We bought our plane tickets last week. (Travel tip for you moving abroad types: look for round-trip fares with the return date during low season. We actually bought round trip tickets and saved over $800 dollars by playing with various return dates. Airfare is super wacky. How is it exactly that it costs so much less to buy round trip tickets than one-ways?)
It seemed to spark a sense of finality to everything we're doing here. It's coming to a close so quickly. And just as the weather is becoming perfect and sunny every day. Of course.
Right now the sun is streaming into the kitchen, Ada is asleep, and I can smell the clean laundry hanging outside the open window. I'm trying to savor this period of my life as one that is uniquely beautiful and peaceful. Time in the park. Bike rides on cobble stones. Trips to the fruit stand. Reading in the library. Toddling around piazzas. Chasing pigeons. Tasting gelato.
Mike and I were talking on the way home from church about how people probably think our life is like living out a nine-month vacation in Italy. It feels a tiny bit like that some times. There are still many days that I pause as I enter the Piazza Maggiore and think, "I live here?!" Or times when I see two old women arm in arm window shopping in the matching coats and hats and smile because they're just so Italian.Other times I'm held up in frustration by how paralyzing a language barrier can be (still) or how difficult simple tasks are.
I feel settled into the pace, the routine, the idiosyncrasy of living in a Medieval city. And many days, I don't feel ready to go home. Good thing we have 5 weeks left to live it up (or live it up in the library, if you're a husband in graduate school approaching a brutal round of finals) before embarking on the next leg of our adventure.
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