Adventure | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Adventure

Unknown v. 2.0

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 9 Comments

August 3^rd slipped by this year without a hint of fanfare (unless you count a dirty house as a celebratory tradition); it was a normal Wednesday in a normal workweek in a normal summer, and it completely slipped my mind that this normal was once the sheer unknown gaping underneath.

Four years ago, we packed our lives into a motley assortment of boxes and tracked a thing with feathers across the Atlantic. Through miracle and determination, Dan had found a job here that fit his abilities perfectly, and the opportunity to finally, finally take on our dream was marvel and terror at once. Some nights, we danced in a buzz of ideas, lit from the inside out with the champagne-glow of adventure. Other nights, we lay creased in thought, my hand resting on the precious variable in my womb as the whens and hows circled like vultures overhead.

There was no gingerly edging off the beaten path, no feeling out each new step from the safety of solid ground, no road signs assuring prosperity in 4,500 miles. All we had was the blank expanse of possibility and the faith to leap, spurred on by knowing our options boiled down to courage or regret. We took the leap, and on August 3^rd, 2007, we landed on Italian soil to begin forging our new normal. In the four years since, we’ve settled into the comfort of friendships and routine, language becoming ever less of a barrier and the Italian culture sinking ever deeper into our bones. It’s more than we could have hoped for when we boarded the jet back in Philadelphia…

…which makes this new drop-off all the more dizzying.

Dan has turned in his job resignation. It was necessary for a variety of reasons, and it was time, but oh. We’re here again with the buzzing ideas and circling questions, minus one occupied womb and plus one meticulously written business plan, and while there are possibilities that make our heads spin with goodness, they’re still only possibilities. Our now-normal has a windblown pang to it. I keep taking mental inventory against my better judgment and trying to work out which facets of our life—home? church? friends? money?—will still be in place come Christmas. My heart balks as the calendar pulls us forward.

Never mind that we wouldn’t be here in the first place without that leap off the edge of reason; I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want that momentary weightlessness above the dark pit of my imaginings. I don’t want to have to rely so completely on a divine intention I still have difficulty trusting (and sometimes believing at all). I just want someone who can peek into the future and put a stamp of guarantee on our steps before we plunge into them. I would like the risk eliminated altogether, thankyouverymuch.

But if I’m honest with myself, it’s only the narrowest bit of my mind that’s clinging to the notion of safety. The broader scope of who I am recognizes that ours, like any good story in the making, runs on the cogs of adventure. These tenuous days swinging between doubt and hope are paragraph spaces in an unfolding work of art that teaches us to live as protagonists rather than as background filler, and the process is nothing short of exhilarating.

It seems clear that August 3^rd has served its time as a memorial to our story and is now ready to pass on the honor to a new date, a new landing—whenever and however it may be.

2May

Sanity at its Handiest

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

Here is my mantra for the day: “I am going to blog today, dangit, I AM GOING TO BLOG.”

Principalities and powers and double-part-time* working hours have conspired to keep me away from the blank page lately, and they probably would have continued unabated had my husband not looked straight into my crazed eyes over the weekend and reminded me that some cultures value sanity. The man makes a convincing argument, and not just because he accompanies it with freshly-brewed espresso. I mean, I’ve gone so long now without catching you up on our Easter camping trip that both it and Princess Beatrice’s hat are old news. (But will that keep me from doing so anyway?)**

* Doesn’t count as full-time because I’m a freelancer and also like deluding myself.
** No.

Two Easters ago, we went on an impromptu camping trip that was so magical and life-infusing that we dubbed it a new family tradition and went back the next year. This Easter, we decided to expand our horizons a bit and head north to Lake Como from whence not even a rainy forecast could deter us. What did deter us, however, was our car, which fainted rather suddenly in the middle of a roundabout mere hours before our scheduled departure. It was Friday evening; the holiday weekend had already begun. No mechanic shop would be open until Tuesday, and even that was doubtful as traditional Italian Easter feasts require several days of recovery. Como would have to wait.

Just in case you ever find yourself in this situation, I’ve put together a handy guide gleaned from our experience – What to do when your car breaks down in Italy negating your anticipated Easter camping trip:

Set up the tent on your balcony, avoiding eye contact with the neighbors. Stock it with My Little Ponies. When your preschoolers ask if they can sleep out there by themselves in the rain, shrug and answer, “Eh, why not?”

Ride the bus downtown to chase pigeons. Purchase giant parmesan pretzels from an Austrian entrepreneur. Chase pigeons with giant parmesan pretzels. Sample every single shade flavor of lip gloss at The Body Shop. Invent the extremely safe and socially acceptable sport of escalator racing.

Have a pizza picnic on the floor. Have a strawberry picnic on the floor. Have a banana split picnic, not on the floor. Discover that your children do not like banana splits (“My ice cream and bananas are touching!”) and ease their distress by eating the rest for them.

Hurl football-sized chocolate eggs at your unsuspecting spouse and complete a nutritious breakfast with the fragments. Host an Easter egg hunt in the backyard so as to have enough candy on hand for a nutritious supper as well. If running out of chocolate, dine on green eggs and ham—just so long as eggs are somewhere on the menu.

Sleep in until noon, build nerdy Lego contraptions, watch music videos and talent shows and hilariously awful infomercials, impersonate cows, play a very pink version of kickball, and if you hit a lull, go with the failproof Granny Pants Dance.

There you go. Sanity has been restored, my blog is marginally more up to date, and a new wisdom-packed vacation guide is out in the world. And who knows? One of us might even get a new Easter tradition out of it.

23Mar

Harebrained

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Admittedly, our weekend in Rome wasn’t the most harebrained idea I’ve ever jumped on, but it clearly was not the work of a sound mind. One daughter was vomiting, you see. The other was dealing with a bout of “poop juice” (what her term lacks in delicacy it more than makes up for in originality), and I was feverish from a mild case of food poisoning. However, one’s husband only runs his first marathon once, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cheer him on. Besides, it was Rome. Cobblestone streets, gold-plated basilicas, Colosseums, Rome. We were all going.

The decision was at least 30% mistake. The family and friends of 14,000 racers seeped along the streets carrying curious tourists along, and a sickly mama with a preschooler attached to each arm was no match for the full-bodied tide. We never made it within 300 meters of the starting line, and we were somehow less successful at finding the finish. As for my vision of popping up around the city like moles with Metro passes, arriving at famous monuments with impeccable timing to whistle and snap artsy photos as Dan ran past… well, we were actually more like earthworms, inching from the underground stops in pale discombobulation and completely missing our first pre-planned photo opportunity because we were lying belly-up in the sun.

However, for all its faults, the experience was one I’m glad I took life up on. Had the girls and I stayed curled under familiar blankets, we wouldn’t have gotten to watch spring wake fresh-faced from her beauty sleep and beam into the niches of the Eternal City. It was a rare kind of pleasure to sit on a marble bench in the Piazza del Popolo with the sun freckling my nose and the girls napping on my lap while we waited for Dan to sweep by on the stream of marathon runners. For that hour, we had no obligation to tour or snap photos or do anything; it was a golden opportunity to just be, and the unplanned respite could not have been more perfect. While tourists milled around surreptitiously snapping photos of us (“I’ve never seen such a sight in all of Rome,” grinned the man who offered to take a shot on my camera), I soaked up spring and the precious nearness of my still-little girls.

And then my husband ran past—kilometer 37 of 42.2—and it was incredible to see his hard work and dedication in every footstep planted on centuries’-old pavement. We smiled at each other like married people do, one in sickness, one in health, both calculating the experiences of our life together and coming up rich. Then he turned the corner, the girls and I collected our jackets and sickness bags, and all four of us headed on jellied legs toward the finish.

That was about the time the girls and I got lost and Dan ended up dehydrated and we realized it was three in the afternoon and some of us hadn’t eaten in 24 hours and our parking meter ran out and the glamor of our adventure was trampled under tired feet and I decided that next year I’m limiting my spring-welcoming activities to opening windows and potting flowers. Still, even our least sane ideas lead to experiences that we cherish as our family’s most valuable keepsakes, and there’s no doubt in my feverish, harebrained mind that we left Rome richer than we came.

2Feb

Handful of Confetti

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Culturally, expat life in Italy is the stuff of daydreams; logistically, it can be more of a nightmare. Just to apply for a local driver’s license, one first has to acquire a residence card, a requirement for which is a permesso di soggiorno—permission to stay in the country, for which one must have a visa which must be applied for in one’s native country but with documents that must be gotten in Italy. Each step in the process requires energy, patience, and a therapeutic sense of humor to keep sanity in place.

Say, for example, that you are ready to apply for your permesso. One of the documents you are required to bring is an official form certifying your housing situation, so you go ask your landlord for a copy. Your landlord doesn’t know anything about any such form. You do some research and finally figure out where he can go to apply for this form. Only he has had renovations done on the house that are not yet documented with the government, and what’s more, he doesn’t want to document them with the government because he neglected to apply for his permission to make those renovations in the first place. He stalls. You do more research and find that it is actually illegal for him to be renting to you without this housing form. He finally relents, finds a way to work around the system (you try not to think too much about this part), and applies for the form. After a few weeks, you are called to the housing office to verify information about how many people are living with you, only when you arrive, you discover the office is on vacation for the month. When the month is up, you return and find out that your American birth certificate needs a special stamp to guarantee its legitimacy before the office will accept it. You mail you birth certificate with fear and trembling to the States where it is stamped and mailed back to you (without getting lost en route, thank goodness), and you return once again to the housing office. All goes smoothly this time, but the form you are waiting on will not be ready for awhile. “Don’t worry,” the housing officials assure you. “We will mail your landlord a letter when the form is ready to be picked up.” And that’s just for one document.

Tobias Jones describes the process of dealing with Italian bureaucracy “like trying to catch confetti: having to race from one office to another, filling in forms and requests, trying to grasp pieces of paper which always just elude your grasp.” I would agree with that except that it sounds like a whirl of activity whereas most of our experience with government offices here has centered around waiting… and waiting… and waaaaaaiiiiiittttttiiiiiiinnnnngggg.

This country has our hearts firmly in its grasp though. We willingly jump through the hoops—or more accurately, wait in the lines—to wake up to the Appennine sun luring fog out of the valley to incandesce with it in open air. We do it for day trips to Etruscan villages, for “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” sung in two languages, for lunchtime chats with our favorite pizzaiolo while he twirls our pizza to perfection in his brick oven. Even Italians think we’re crazy for giving up the American Dream for a life swathed in red tape, and maybe of course we are. But this is home to us. Living here is worth the frustration of trying to do so legally.

And you know, the struggle, the confetti-grasping, and the forced cultivation of patience are exactly what make small victories like this morning’s trip to renew health cards all the more precious.

10Jan

Dramamire

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I feel like I should preface whatever comes out of my fingers next by saying that sometime during the night, my brain tripped into a custard quagmire and is now up to its eyeballs in thick, eggy blandness. I have nothing interesting to say although you might think I would considering I’m hopping on a Florida-bound plane Sunday morning and have less than a week to arrange for my family’s survival in my absence and to talk myself out of any dramatic airport scenes. There’s a slight possibility that I’m not looking forward to the trip. (Maybe that explains why I spent all morning avoiding my damn to-do list? And now I’m swearing. F—crap.)

Here’s the thing: While this trip really isn’t a big deal—just a skip over the pond to renew some documents and eat fried okra as much as possible—my imagination has taken it upon itself to prepare me for any eventuality. The following is a sample of likely trip outcomes, courtesy of my flair for the dramatic:

Blizzard-hurricaness bury the plane during my layover on the East Coast, pulling down frigid air from the melting polar ice caps that freezes everything on contact and ushers us into the second ice age just like Dennis Quaid predicted; I miss my flight.
I arrive safely, but the U.S. customs official revokes my citizenship because I chose to live elsewhere, and I am forced to spend the rest of my life wandering the airport countryless à la Tom Hanks.
I forget to leave detailed instructions for our washing machine (which no longer has indicative markings because the factory painted them on with a special air-soluble glaze), and my family runs out of clean clothes and slowly dies of scabies while I search in vain for free wi-fi.
Everything goes smoothly and I’m allowed to return home, but my ears explode on the flight due to pressure changes and the fact that they are world-class wimps, and the resulting spatter of gore gunks up the landing gear resulting in a spectacular crash; my corpse is recovered and donated to science who rejects it on the grounds of earlessness.

I guess what it all boils down to is that I don’t want to leave my husband and girls, even for a week. The thrill of adventure is notably absent this time; travel-related calamities are no fun without my little family to share them with. True, I’ll get to read entire books uninterrupted on the plane, and I might even get to eat my Sky Chef boeuf bourguignon while it’s still hot, but… I’ll miss them. A lot. The end.

Custard, take me away…

22Dec

No Morale of the Story

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My Top 5 Expat Blunders (because everyone loves an embarrassing story… or five):

5) Shortly after we moved to Italy, I was trying to get to know some of the women around my age at church despite my struggles with the language. I tried breaking the ice one Sunday morning by complimenting two of them on their retro jewelry. “In fact,” I continued, “when I was young—” Immediately, they doubled over laughing. I later learned that the word “young” in Italian applies to people from ages 14 to 40, and I might as well have started the sentence, “When I was middle-aged.” Oy.

4) In the early days of life here, even simple trips to the grocery store were daunting. I had to memorize vocabulary lists just to make sure I ended up with toothpaste instead of antifungal cream, and it took me a couple of weeks before I worked up enough courage to order from the deli counter. I had taken careful mental notes when shopping with Dan though, and I knew how to specify whether I wanted mild cheese or sharp, aged or soft, sliced or in a wedge. I also knew I should ask to taste a sample before ordering, so I cleared the trepidation from my throat and ventured, “Can I taste, please?” The counter attendant raised one eyebrow and asked, “Come again?” “Um, can I please taste?” The attendant shook her head in confusion. I tried another approach: “Can I taste a piece?” Nothing. I pointed at the cheese we were discussing and enunciated carefully, “I want to taste this cheese please.” Now both her eyebrows were raising and lowering in quick succession. I finally gave up, ordered the cheese unsampled as it was, and hurried home where I discovered that I had gotten the word for “taste” confused with the similar-sounding one for “dry.” Why yes, I had just spent several minutes trying to convince the deli attendant to let me dry her cheese. On the upside, I haven’t gotten the two words confused since.

3) Once upon a time, we took a stroller, my pregnant belly, and a week’s worth of grocery purchases on a bus. You can read all the painful details here.

2) Two winters ago, we went with a large group of friends on a settimana bianca—a week in the mountains at a ski resort. The lodge we were all staying in provided meals in a giant mess hall, so I didn’t have to worry about packing anything more than my snowboarding gear. As it turns out, I should have worried about packing more than my snowboarding gear. I realized within minutes of arriving that my fleece hoodies and wool sweaters would stifle me to death in the lodge’s near-tropical heat, and that left me with only my undershirts as viable tops. And within seconds of arriving at supper that first night, sweating in my jeans, snow boots, and thermals, I realized that meals on a settimana bianca are formal affairs. Our friends were utterly elegant in their high heels and ties, and I looked like Frosty the Snowslob in the middle of a meltdown. It was a long week.

1) Today was dedicated to the girls; I took them to a special kids’ event at a local restaurant this morning, and then we had fun getting together their costumes for this evening’s school play. The theme for the play was “A world without borders,” and Natalie got to don my sparkly pink cowgirl hat to portray an “americana” while Sophie was transformed into history’s cutest wolf with furry ears, a homemade tail, and lovingly hand-drawn whiskers. Most of the children in their class were assigned the same costume—“jeans + lupetto bianco”—but I didn’t have a chance to see the other wolf costumes until Dan and I were settled in our seats and the curtains rose. There on stage was a choir of preschool angels, adorable in matching white shirts and golden halos… plus one set of shaggy lupine appendages. Sophie was the only wolf. The horrible suspicion that dawned on me was easily confirmed: “lupetto” also means turtleneck. We dashed out as soon as the play ended, but I still have to show my face at the girls’ school tomorrow. I could use a stiff shot of tequi morale right about now.

Friends, this is your time to shine. If you value my dignity more than I do at the moment, share your own embarrassing moments and spare me the necessity of running off to Greenland and having to start this whole expat process again.

2Nov

Highland Fling – Part 12

Posted by: Bethany in Highland Fling 2 Comments

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, & 11)

In some ways, we were more than ready to hit the road. We were beginning to miss the familiarity of our home routines, my kitchen gadgetry, your Lego collection, PIZZA. However, the novelty of Scotland still glittered through its cloud cover, and we left the best way one can leave a place—full of hope to return. Of course, we might not have been so cheery had we realized that nine (9) hours of the UK’s thickest traffic stood between us and our campsite near Dover. You girls did amazingly well—a few pillows, some dry-erase markers, and plenty of loud music, and you’re model travelers—but my goodness… By our third full decade spent inching around the London Orbital, I had to choose between weeping and using the English language in exciting and colorful ways. Thank goodness for the aforementioned loud music.

Happily oblivious to the pressures of driving on blanky-blankish roads among blankety percent of the blanking world’s blanker-blanked vehicle population, most of which was blankly blanketing at a blank of 0.blank miles per blankety blank.

By the time we arrived in Folkestone, we barely had enough energy to set up our tent, eat fish ‘n’ chips, and get in several pointless arguments before crashing for the night. (The last argument or two took some real effort, but I’m proud of us for being able to fit in those extra misunderstandings and irritations, especially after such a long day.) The next morning dawned beautifully though. We made it onto our ferry with three minutes to spare, you girls immediately took up residence in the play room, and all was well with our souls once again. Well, mostly. We still had to drive across the flat expanse of flatness that is Belgium, but through a herculean effort, your dad managed not to fall asleep at the wheel, and we were soon rolling through Luxembourg’s blessedly varied terrain.

Are you taking notes, Belgium?

Our destination for the night was the fairy tale town of Vianden nestled in a forest along the sleepy River Our. We quickly discovered that unlike the larger, more touristy Luxembourg City, Vianden’s locals were merely trilingual, and as your dad and I speak a combined total of six words in French and German and a combined total of zero in Luxembourgish, communication proved amusing. (For the most part, that is. Trying to explain to the campground manager that we wanted an electric hook-up? Definitely. Enduring frigid, cobwebby showers before realizing there was an entirely separate shower complex? A little less so.) Also, it was a shock to our senses emerging from the UK’s overarching coolness into the muggy, sweltering underbelly of summer in mainland Europe. The first thing you girls did at the campground was ride the playground chicken back to Scotland where it was not 1,000,000°C.

“Hey girls, what is your chicken named?”
“It’s not a chicken! It’s a rooster!”
“Okay, so what is your rooster named?”
“Chicken.”

However, we managed not only to survive our stay but to be utterly charmed. Vianden’s main attraction is a beautiful little castle perched halfway up the mountainside, accessible by foot or chair lift. In deference to short legs, we chose the latter. (You’re welcome!) Your dad used his superpowers to convince the lift attendant that they understood each other, and we soon found ourselves being whisked up and away over the town rooftops, the gentle turns of the river, and the breathtaking Château de Vianden over which you girls immediately claimed jurisdiction. None of us had gotten enough of hiking yet (right? right?), so we naturally opted to walk down the mountain rather than take the return lift… which led to us opting to spend the castle entrance fee on ice cream. Naturally.

You girls were mightily in favor of the ice cream part of our decision.

Unfortunately for your future prospects, we didn’t move into the castle. I can’t say I would have minded the view; Vianden’s patch of buildings was an extension of the lush countryside, and daydreams practically spun themselves out of the tranquil hum of its summer air. However, driving around for an hour trying to find the town’s one ATM and taking that cold shower (did I mention the cold shower? and its exceeding coldness? Had it not been the hottest day of the year, I would still be frozen to the tile floor) made me pine rather sharply for home. Plus, and I hate to admit this, but the enchantment of tent life was starting to wear thin. The ground was seeming harder, the rooms smaller, and the bathrooms farther away. Conveniently for our collective sanity’s sake, we had only one stop left on our adventure.

Adieu, Château. (Two of the six words.)

~~~

On to Part 13…

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