I Miss Rome

Well, there ought to be an introductory post or something before I just plunge in, but whatever.

I miss Rome.

The four-day Rosh Hashanah long weekend is drawing to a close, and I feel increasingly more depressed. Last summer I went to Greece, Italy, and France with People to People, and it really changed me. It's hard to understand unless you've been there. It's so damn dark and uncolorful here in New Jersey, and it's so... bright there. The sky is this shade of blue that doesn't happen in America. The colors are radiant, and the sun emits rays that shine visibly. The art is beautiful. The people are vibrant.
It sucks here.
And DO NOT GET STARTED on: "Oh, look at you, Precious Little Miss Sensitive. You think you're freaking unique cause you've got teen angst and written yourself a poetic paragraph about your summer vacation. So you got to sigh romantically on a gondola in July, and now you feel sorry for yourself because you have to have real responsibilities like homework again? Sorry, finding it hard to sympathize."
Because if one more person instantly guesses I'm like that because I'm a teenage girl, I will scream in frustration.
I studied art history last year, as a freshman (in high school) and got a five on the AP exam. I absolutely loved the subject, and I was insanely excited to go to Europe. I was nervous, too- I'd never even been to summer camp, and here I was going for three weeks with a group of strangers to another continent. The first day was entirely spent on a plane and a layover in Dusseldorf, Germany. Exhausted, I fell asleep on the plane to Athens.
I woke up twenty minutes before we arrived in Athens International Airport and groggily glanced out the window to see the Mediterranean. Suddenly, I could barely contain my excitement. I was staring out the window, eager to see a better glimpse of the land below. Greece is beautiful, and I soaked in the mountains and desert and marble far below me.
The next day, I was on the Acropolis, surprising the tour guide with my endless flow of facts about the Parthenon. Day after, we went to the beach on Aegina and I swam in the Mediterranean and broke off to take pictures in a beautiful Byzantine church. (I'm Jewish, by the way; I just love art.)
We drove through the Greek mountains and I tried to write in my journal but failed to take my eyes off the mystifying landscape. How is this real? I wondered. Today, I still can't believe that Greece was not a figment of my imagination or a dream except for the fact that my imagination could never dream up something so beautiful. But if my eyes drifted closed from the heat at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, I would instantly see, not blackness, but a bright vision of an island on the Mediterranean...
On our last day in Greece I raced at the original Olympic track and ate stuffed tomatoes in an open-air restaurant. We drove to the seaport and I stared off at the clouds rising like smoke over the mountains, melancholy over our departure.
When I woke up the next morning on the ferry, it took a while for me to register what I would eventually  be ecstatic over. At breakfast, I looked out at the sea at the landmass behind it and suddenly realized- we were nearing Italy! The sunlight shone and I could barely contain my happiness.
I'm in love with this country, I thought to myself as we drove through miles of hills covered in dark green trees. We toured Pompeii and ended the day in Napoli, where we stayed in a nunnery standing at the edge of a cliff. The next day, I (and most of the rest of my delegation) climbed the length of the crater of Vesuvius. Absolutely terrifying- and insanely breathtaking.
The happiest day of my life was easily July 19, 2011; the day I went to the Vatican. My favorite artist has been Michelangelo since the summer after eighth grade, and the place I had most been looking forward to seeing was the Sistine Chapel. It awed me- no- words don't describe it. I know most people that go there kind of go, "Yay, cool art, but after that long walk through the museum I kind of just want to get out of this crowd," and I'd have credited that to a lack of knowledge of art history, but after being there, I don't know what to credit that kind of reaction to. Michelangelo's work left me speechless.
After excitedly seeing St. Peter's basilica, I was still insanely happy as we broke off into groups to spend three hours checking out the monuments of Rome. I ran ahead to the Pantheon and lectured my poor group on its architecture. Then, we talked with street artists and Italian tourists in Piazza Navona as the sun set and had fantastic pizza and gelato.
I was tired as we toured the Colosseum the next day and went to Assisi, a beautiful town with fields of sunflowers and quiet hills. In the morning, we drove through the small town as, by chance, Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence played on the bus while the sun rose outside the window.
As we walked through the streets of Florence, I felt the spirit of the Early Renaissance resonate through me from the bricks we walked on. I stood in awe of Michelangelo's David  (here come the penis jokes; I'm a teenage girl and that's all I think about, right guys?) and the Doors of Paradise on the Florence Baptistery.
It was raining the day we left Venice. I rode on a gondola and saw St. Mark's Cathedral (only from the OUTSIDE unfortunately) and slipped through the narrow alleyways as it rained silver flurries. At the end of the day, it was time to leave and we boarded the train. I tried to write but the lights went out and I had to go to sleep, mourning our leaving behind the place I wanted to call home...
In the early morning, I left our compartment for a few minutes and, when I returned, I looked out the window for a moment at rolling green countryside and signs in French. "We're in France," I whispered.
I took advantage of the hourlong bus ride to Paris to write, but when we arrived, I looked up. Monuments seemed to shout to me: The Panthéon! Notre-Dame! The Eiffel Tower! The Opéra Garnier! Later that day, we toured the Louvre and I stared up at Winged Victory and the mysterious Mona Lisa. In the five minutes of free time we were given at the end, I raced to see the nineteenth-century paintings I knew were housed there.
We had a homestay in the small town of Reims, where my host family took me to see the town's famous champagne caves, the home of a French poet, and most excitingly (to me anyway) the Gothic Cathedrale  the town was home to. (It's supposed to have an 'e', and no, that's not an attempt to be an edgy cultured hipster or whatever the hell teens do to piss off adults.)
Back in Paris, I stared out at the Eiffel Tower from a platform as I sat on stairs, Paul Simon's El Condor Pasa playing in the background, the sunlight merry around me, and reflected that in two days all of this would be gone. "I wish," I thought, "that I was visiting Paris at the time this tower was built... the turn of the century, the World's Fair, the modernists, the artists and poets and rebels..."
Notre-Dame was beautiful, and it rained as I walked around it, admiring the flying buttresses and the spitting gargoyles. I bought and ate a Nutella crepe on Monmartre. (It was delicious.)
The last day we were in France we went to Versailles and to the top of the Eiffel Tower. When I was on the plane the next day I wrote about it, and to refresh my memory I flipped through my camera's pictures. I stared at the picture of me at the top of the tower... I was so happy... I was so completely contented...
And as I landed in Newark, for the first time in three weeks I arrived in a new country and, rather than being excited and hopeful, I was miserable.

And it's been more than two months since I got back. I've started school. I've got homework to do. I'm back at my two jobs (at the library and at my temple). I've got a book to finish before November. I'm trying to get myself a job as a columnist in a Jewish magazine....

And not a day goes by when I don't think longingly of the fields of Italy.

And I know nobody will read this anyway, and I know if you do you don't GIVE a crap, even if you personally know me. I know that everyone who reads this will think I'm just a dumb, melodramatic teenager who over-romanticizes stupid crap. I know what you're thinking: "Ha! She studied art history? What next, the philosophy of Care Bears? What a dumb idiot. Humanities, writing, as if that's a real future for anyone. And now she whines about being in the best-off country in the world?"

But I had to get all of this out, even if no one can relate to it. Because, more than anything else in the world right now, I want to go home. The next three years are just filler, just a long period of me getting good grades (which I inevitably will) until I can go back home.

Yup, over-romanticizing it. Spend nine days in a country and you want to live there rather than the privileged country you've spent your whole life in, you must be pretty darn spoiled.
But I want so badly to go back, you have no idea.

-Ariel (magic-esi)