Every once in a while you get those moments when you decide that you need a good break from the daily struggles of being you and that you should probably leave town for something different.
Sometimes I like to call those days Fridays
Well being in Munich is awesome but not traveling when everything is just about a train ride away would be a true crime. So with a long weekend on the horizon I decided that since everyone else in my program was traveling, I would do like them and travel. I was in contact with one of my good friends who moved to Italy when we were in middle school and he said that him and his parents would be more than glad to host me for a weekend so I could get to visit Rome. That was all the motivation I needed and I looked for a train ticket to Rome.
there is an actual giant lute in the middle of Italy
I’ve probably said it countless times before but traveling somewhere where you know someone, you will stay with someone, or will have someone who knows the place show you around is probably one of the best ways to get to know a place. Italy was no exception. I had an amazing time in Italy and I was really grateful that I got that sudden urge to travel and that I had the chance to get to know Italy a little bit better.
4 realizations from my trip to Italy
1. There are a ton of tourist everywhere!
the fountain in the middle spews out people 4 times a day
I obviously knew before hand that Rome was going to have tourist everywhere. I really wasn’t surprised by the idea that there were tourist but more by the amount of tourist there were. They are all over the place. Obviously they are there for the same reason I was, to visit the city, see the sights, take instagram pictures, and just be touristy. The amount though was amazing, mainly because Rome is a pretty big city. Everywhere I would go there would be swarms of tourists. Japanese tourists with their socks, sandals, fanny pack, and overly pimped out camera which he will use to take enough pictures to kill the trip for any of his friends who once had a dream of traveling to Rome.
Finally! 45 pictures of the same building in different angles
British tourists tend to stick out with their red lobster glow, men wearing capri pants, and young girls who have not really figured out what the length of a short should be.
English men are sponsored by Super Dry and horrible tattoo artists
To my personal favorite group of tourists, American teenagers. Maybe it is the loud English being emitted from the blob that is your tour group, or it could just be that one annoying loud kid who brings attention to himself and your group by wearing a giant culturally insensitive hat, regardless your group will forever be known.
EF Tours has now made picking them out so much easier
They swarm throughout the city like maggots eating a dead carcass. Did I need to use such a vivid analogy? Yes! and more on that later. I think the whole tourist thing came down hard because we always imagine Italy to be such a romantic and Italian place and seeing so many non-Italians roaming around kinda breaks that expectation quite fast. I also could imagine taking pictures of Italy to be so much easier, and not that it wasn’t, but be prepared for your fair share of photobombings and random people that don’t need to be in your picture.
thanks to the tourist of Rome for making my pictures more memorable
2. Rome is a giant tourist trap
Kinda like the Colosseum was a trap for indentured servants
Understandably a city with a huge tourism sector would want to milk that cow and make sure their coffers are full but Rome has taken tourism to a whole new level. Living in Orlando I can completely understand how important tourism is for an economy but there is a difference between the two. Orlando was a small town next to a swamp before Walt Disney decided to bring a cute looking rat couple over to Florida and build them a giant German inspired castle . Rome on the other hand has thousands of years of history spanning empires and the names of dictators and despots carved in stone. I would assume that a city like Rome would command some more respect for having such a rich cultural heritage but apparently I was wrong.
the things you do for a klondike bar
In their quest to squeeze dimes out of pennies, the entrepreneurs of Rome (which for the most part aren’t even Italian) have gone all out at making sure that you will fall into their traps. Fake gladiators will charm you into taking pictures with them, because who wouldn’t want to take pictures with two Romanians, from the country of Romania and not the city of Rome, with plastic abs and a shitty Italian accent. If the gladiators aren’t your thing, then you can always go for the Indian street vendors
Gucci would be so proud of the 2 for 20 deal on such immaculate sunglasses
and because all illegal and annoying activities would not be legitimate without competition.
and if you donate some money to my cousin in Nigeria…
So let’s say you tell all these people that cheap goods are not the reason you came for Rome. Well that is just half the battle because if I can’t sell you a good, then let me try to sell you a culturally irrelevant moment.
how many cultures can we insult at the same time?
And you can’t run away from them. Try as hard as you will but they manage to fake levitate all over Rome. David Blaine and David Copperfield would be starving on food stamps if they lived in Rome. So once you are done with vendorpalooza you decide that they can’t possibly serve non-Italian food because if there is one thing tourist will flip about it will be about the lack of pasta. Well you are right except you can still get done in on this one as well. Go to any restaurant and be prepared to see plates of pasta in the 30 euros without sauce. You choose the Carbonara and a wine and hope for the best.
still don’t understand Rome do you?
Well just like the new Dasani water bottle is designed to be more ergonomic and therefore carry less water, the restaurant has decided that the plate was too pasta heavy and given you the kid’s meal portion. I’ve seen dollar cheeseburgers at McDonalds pack more heat than Rome. So once you get ready to pay, you get charged a service fee, because you look foreign, don’t speak Italian, and vaffanculo. I have probably had better pasta at Olive Garden but when in Rome. Eating is done but think twice about going out at night because you will be invited to 50 different bar hops with drunk English teens and roudy American college students or you will hit a club owned by some Russian or Romanian steel magnate who tricks guys into paying 30 euro covers and 20 euro drinks thinking they will see the hottest Italian girls when in reality it is more like a sausage fest fighting for the attention of the Romanian girl who is passing herself off as Italian because foreign guys.
going out clubbing with the guys takes another new meaning in Rome
So maybe I may have had a bad night in Rome but I will stand firm in my belief that Rome has gone down the steps of its former glory.
3. true Italy is outside of the big cities
just like Grandma used to make it
The best thing about being with locals is that they will know the best places to go to. I was lucky enough that my friends family knew what real Italy was and where to find it. Guidonia and Tivoli are two small towns outside of Rome that feel just like I imagined Italy to feel like. The roads were narrow, the buildings looked authentic, and the landscapes were just like any old Italian in America would describe the home country.
if it makes it more Italian I took this picture on my Vespa
While Rome is Rome and there is no substitute for seeing what was the capital of the Roman Empire, sometimes you just want to see the culture and take in what is genuinely from that place. I feel like I could have never had that experience within the boundaries of Rome but once I went out to the small towns, I could totally experience it. So much that a a couple of people we walked by on the small streets looked at us and were quite surprised to see two guys speaking English and Spanish. You could tell that tourism had not yet killed the town of its local culture. Sometimes it is nice to see places that are not negatively affected by such aspects. One of the things that was completely changed for me was Italian food. As told by my friend and his whole family, you will not get real Italian food unless you eat out of the city. Inside the city they cater to tourist whose palates are not normally accustomed to actual Italian food so quality takes a dive for quantity and profit. Outside the city the competition is stiff because a culture that takes its food so seriously and with such fervor will not allow for anything except top quality when it comes to food.
half the price and twice the quality of anything in Rome
More importantly the people were awesome. They are way more relaxed and you can feel that warmth between people than in the city. They asked me about the trip, what it was like in Germany, if the meal was better than Rome. Even when navigating the murky waters of Spanish to Italian communication, the awkward moments become laughs and you learn that communication is not only verbal.
4. I only uncovered a fraction of Italy
although visiting the Pope in the Vatican means I visited another country
Considering I had 4 days, including travel days, I saw a lot of Italy. I stopped near Bolzano/Bozen in the north and heard an Italian dialect of German and saw a German culture that I didn’t really expect in Italy. Drove through Trento, Verona, Modena, Bologna, and Florence. I saw the complete landscape of Italy from the Austrian border down to Rome. I thought my trip was really successful for the amount of time I had but after talking with my friend and his family, talking with the others in my study abroad group, and talking to my German friends I discovered that I had only seen a glimpse of what Italy has to offer. I hadn’t seen Venice, Milan, Turin, Naples, Catania, Palermo, Cagliari, Lecce, and Bari, all big cities in their respective regions. Hell, you could get a guy from Turin and a man from Catania together and they would probably struggle to understand each other’s dialects. Italy is pretty big and diverse. I got an idea of what the Italy we believe to be true Italy is because the average stereotype is based off of Rome and the region of Lazio but when it comes to understanding actual Italy and how multicultural it is, I am just beginning.
let’s make things change!
And it doesn’t bother me one bit. It means that I have many more things to see and newer experiences to be had. Although whenever I do leave a place I always go through two types of nostalgic thought. I either become sad because I know that I will never return to that place again or I become nostalgic thinking of when the next time I will be in that place be and how it will have changed for me by the next time I will be going back. For Italy, I feel like I will be back and hopefully that nostalgia will only turn into more motivation to go a visit it again.
you also have to visit old friends
A last note
It may have sounded like I was completely tearing Rome apart but I liked Rome. Rome is such a beautiful city and has so many historical sites to see and the amount of history and culture in the city is astonishing. I completely understand why people travel from the nether regions of the globe to come see this city. My problem comes with the handling of the tourist and what tourist do that create such, in my opinion anyway, a cheesy atmosphere. Tourist paying to take cheesy non-authentic pictures with gladiators and levitating monks will just keep perpetuating those occurrences throughout the city. Tourist buying trash quality sunglasses and purses from illegal street vendors will just keep perpetuating their business. The more tourists shell out dollars to these people, the more these annoying practices will continue. Nothing is more disrespectful in my opinion to the legacy of such an inspiring city than fake mummies and fake products being sold at the doorstep of the Colosseum or Pantheon. It is cultural parasitism and I would not want to see that happening to my culture. While there are things being done to try to stop all the illegal vendors, I feel like the main culprit is the tourist. Whatever you spend your money on, you are supporting it. When I go elsewhere, as well as I do at home, I try to buy local and genuine. If I am in a particular place, and I like what I see, I try to make sure that anything I am buying is directly helping the local culture and people. The right type of tourism builds a place rather than deteriorating it.
reverse kultur shock 