Wandering

I ventured to Milan for all of 30 hours over a weekend while in Geneva for work.  It's the type of thing, the venturing, that I always imagined I would do if given the opportunity, but aside from solo trips to Marrakech while in the Peace Corps, I have never traveled alone abroad.

I was nervous at first, but not excruciatingly so.  I bought my train ticket from Geneva to Milan days before the trip and picked up the ticket at the train station the evening before. There were a couple hiccups (you need your passport to pick up a train ticket? If I bat my eyelashes can I squeak by with a driver's license?) before leaving the station (I read French fairly well and I still can't figure out what the hell the ticket says about my train car and how that corresponds to the actual platform).  But I was snug in my seat with a sandwich and an old, oft-forgotten journal with ten minutes to spare.

The journey from Geneva to Milan is stunning.  You wrap around Lake Geneva, curving through Lausanne, rumbling past smaller towns and green fields with snow-capped mountains in the distance. I jotted nothing in my journal, there was too much to see to waste time trying to document it.  That feeling doesn't often strike me, that writing of something beautiful is meaningless with the beauty right there, but sitting next to a window with an almost-too-bright sun glancing off the waters, I had no desire to put my eyes to paper.

In Italy they speak Italian, which is, were you aware?, a completely different language.  It's funny how the brain works.  While in Geneva, I could function pretty well with my clumsy, dusty French.  In Italy, where I spoke nothing, my brain seemed to revert back to the last time I felt wholly overwhelmed by a foreign tongue: Morocco.  On more than one occasion, when needing to ask for directions or asking for help, the first words in my brain were Arabic, not French.  It's as if my brain recognized that feeling of linguistic helplessness and just reached for the words that last accompanied that anxiety.  French, not Arabic, came in handy a few times, but for the most part I spent the weekend pointing at things when I wanted them, smiling stupidly when people asked me questions, and simply not speaking to pretty much anyone.

I wandered around Milan for hours.  I got lost multiple times.  I'm not an excellent map-reader (as any friend who has watched me get lost after examining a map at the mall can attest). I can usually figure things out but not in a hurry.  This worked out alright as I was all alone, nobody to guide or frustrate as I fumbled with which direction might be North. I could stare at that map for half an hour and there was nobody around to care.  While that did take the pressure off, I'm not the most patient of people so if I couldn't figure it out quickly I tended to just start walking with the assumption that maybe I'd figure it out better if I was in a different spot (don't ask me how that logic works).

Mild frustrations while being lost in the park near Castello Sforenzco notwithstanding, the wandering was the best part.  Better than the gelato, better than the spires of the Duomo, better than the beep and whiz of motor scooters. I am not an introvert by any standard.  I thrive on people and being near them, talking to them, making them laugh, telling stories, hearing stories, exploring the insides of other's ideas, offering my own.  But that extroversion leaves room, and need, for time spent wholly wrapped within my own head, digesting my own environment and not deciphering how it fits into this or that relationship.  I make time for that often but it's rare that I have two straight days of wandering where I please, not only physically, but mentally, too. To be alone in a place full of inspirations, and to have the luxury of absorbing it in whatever way I saw fit, was a blessing beyond the immediate photo opportunity.

On the way back to Geneva I had an hour or so to kill at the Milan train station.  I tucked myself away on a bench and sipped an orange juice while watching the trains roll in and out.  I love orange juice, the fresh, pulpy kind, and that was the variety I held in my hand.  Trains, one of my favorite things on the planet, surrounded me, their engines muffling the sound of dashing high heels, crying babies, the roll of luggage wheels. It struck me that I was nestled in a moment full of many favorites, simple favorites, trains, orange juice, wandering, sitting still, watching.

It wasn't a moment I could take a picture of, not really, nor properly document with a poem or pretty paragraph.  It was just a simple, noisy blessing that felt built for me, crafted by God for my singular attention. I realized that God was the only one who fully (completely, utterly, everything-y) grasped how that moment felt for me, how the exterior (the trains, the juice, the map reading, the blisters of feet that don't want to stop walking, the mild humidity) and the interior (the peace, the calm, the pleasant ache of being alone and not lonely) wrapped around each other and formed a perfect nest of Happy. So I thanked Him for that, knowing He would be the only one who'd every recognize where the gratitude came from and the only one to whom such gratitude was owed.