Arrivederci, Y’all

During my sophomore year of high school, I had panic attacks pretty much once a week. They were mostly triggered by situations that made me feel trapped, like sitting far away from the door or riding a school bus or attending a class with a teacher who wouldn’t let people leave to use the bathroom. Because of this, the school gave me a “flash pass,” a glorified hall pass signed by my counselor that I could show to the teacher at any time to quietly have a panic attack in the hallway. 

My favorite panic attack occurred during advisory, a well-intentioned but completely useless period during which we all watched a special announcement on the projector screens about how to shake hands at job interviews or what to do in the event of a school shooting. You know, high school stuff. Anyway, this meant that during advisory every single classroom was playing the same school announcement at the same time. Right before the announcement started I felt a panic attack coming on (heavy breathing, nausea, sweating, the usual). I flashed my flash pass and went out into the hallway.

As my panic attack started and I paced down the hallway trying to find the most inconspicuous place to freak out, every classroom I passed was playing the same announcement at the same volume at the same time. It felt like a scene from Donnie Darko or The Twilight Zone. Every student was reacting to the same news at the same time in the same way. 

That’s what it felt like when President Harring emailed all of Muhlenberg College to tell us that we were being sent home. I was sitting in my dorm room with my two friends when everyone’s phone went off at once. Everyone read the email at the same time. Everyone gasped. I gasped, my two friends gasped, and I know that everyone in my building either gasped or shrieked because I could hear it through the thin dorm walls. Doors opened up and down the hallway as people went out into the hallway to call their parents, spread the news, and see how everyone else was reacting. There was an almost tangible feeling of shock in the halls. 

Donald Hall wrote a now-famous essay after the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, called “Third Thing.”  “Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment,” he writes. In an odd way, President Harring’s email became a twisted Third Thing for Muhlenberg College. We were all looking at the same thing, not with joint rapture or contentment but with joint anxiety and despair. I will say that while I was shocked and sad and angry, I was also acutely aware that I had never felt as connected to the rest of my school as I did when we received this news. It was bizarre and sort of comforting to know that everybody was experiencing the same thing I was at the exact same time, even though that thing was highly upsetting. 

We got the email at 8:46pm. By 11:00 all my friends had congregated in my dorm room, all feeling the same feelings, talking about the same things, and asking the same questions. Two things really stood out: the first is that the show Aubrey had spent all semester stage managing was now canceled. Aubrey and her cast spent hours and hours and hours every week since the beginning of the semester rehearsing, learning dances, memorizing lines, writing music, building a set, writing rehearsal reports… and it was all undone with one email. The second thing was that we all still had homework due the next day. We all lost our minds a little while Maggie constructed a bulletin board for her education class and Marlee blocked a scene for her directing class. Liz laid on the floor and cried, and Aubrey facetimed her brother. As for me, I listened to early 2000s hits and did papercrafts with Maggie’s bulletin board scraps because there is nothing more soothing to me than mindless activities to do with my hands and angsty nostalgic music. We didn’t disperse until 1:00 in the morning. 

When President Harring sent out that email it was like someone pushed a huge snowball down a mountain. The momentum kept everyone awake and talking and, weirdly, connected. I thought maybe a good night’s sleep would kill or at least slow that momentum and things would feel sad but mostly normal the next morning once everyone got used to the news. That sure as hell didn’t happen. Sitting in the student union felt like sticking your finger in an electrical socket, that’s how charged the atmosphere was. The nihilistic energy was really off the charts. Everyone felt out of control and it seemed pointless to go to classes when we were just going to have to pack up and leave in the next couple days. And as if things couldn’t get any weirder, it was also sack day. Once every semester on sack day the movement class puts on colorful sacks and runs around the student union Using Their Bodies to See How Anonymity and Fabric Makes Them Move Differently. Imagine you’ve just been told you have to leave all your friends because a highly contagious and somewhat deadly virus is spreading across the globe and you have to spend the next month at home with your parents practicing “social distancing” which sounds like something Cosmo magazine would advise readers to do to get over an ex in a small town but actually means that you have to stay inside with nothing but a bottle of Purell and a jumbo pack of toilet paper to keep you company and oh god you’re living through something that your future kids will learn about in history class someday that is if you ever even have kids because you’re single and not allowed to leave the house so how are you supposed to meet the love of your life now and surely it will only be a matter of time until everyone is on lockdown and your friends become tiny faces on tiny screens and no one has felt the touch of another human since lord knows when and and and then some freakin theater kid in a bright yellow sack runs up to you and starts doing an interpretive dance. Try and tell me you wouldn’t lose your mind just a little bit. 

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Anyway, then I went to my Paradise Lost class. 

The momentum lasted the whole entire day. I should mention that I’ve been having some trouble connecting with people lately. I have trouble maintaining eye contact and keeping up conversations because I can’t get out of my own head and stop worrying about what the other person thinks of me. I feel unwilling to meet new people because it doesn’t seem worth the number of hours I’ll spend replaying the conversation in my head and feeling down on myself because I didn’t do a good job, like, being human. So even though I was sad and everyone was sad and I was sad that everyone was sad, I also felt more connected to my community than I have in a really long time. You know that game where everyone stands in a circle and holds hands, and when you feel the person to your right squeeze your hand you squeeze the hand of the person on your left, and you pass the squeeze all the way around the circle? It felt like every twinge of sadness was a squeeze of the hand. Except no one was allowed to hold hands. Or breathe in the same direction. And the Powers That Be mandated that the circle be broken in exactly 48 hours.

That night, Aubrey’s show had one impromptu performance for 400 audience members, first come first served. The show started at 9pm. By 7:30 there was a line out the door all the way to the street. Luckily, Aubrey was able to reserve seats for us close to the stage. The show was The Bacchae, a Greek tragedy about Dionysus and his band of bacchants. Aristotle wrote that “the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “terror and pity” and thereby affect the catharsis of these emotions’ ‘ (Encyclopedia Britannica). Well, let me tell you, I can’t imagine an audience that experienced more catharsis than this one. We were all carried into the theater on a wave of momentum fueled by sadness, uncertainty, and frustration. We waited for over an hour to get to our seats. The second the lights went down, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause. Everyone stomped their feet and screamed, not because of anything happening on stage (the show hadn’t even started yet) but because we were all in the same place, feeling the same thing, all brought together by this piece of theater created by our friends and family and community. The show was fantastic, but the truth of the matter is that even if it were awful we all would have cheered our hearts out just from the sheer emotion of coming together. The Bacchae was not the best show I’ve ever seen, and I’m sure another two weeks of rehearsals would have taken the production to a whole new level. But it was definitely the most impactful theater experience I’ve had. I’ll think of it in Maryland over the next month, and my friends will think of it in Massachusetts and New Jersey and New York and California and wherever else we happen to be until this momentum, this virus, dies. 

As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I attend a small liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania.The greatest challenge of going to a school where you pass the same people on the way to class every day is deciding whether or not to acknowledge them. There are at least twenty people whose names I don’t know and to whom I have never spoken, but who I pass every day, and every day I have to endure the awkwardness of deciding whether to give them a little wave to acknowledge this weird non-relationship relationship that we have and possibly come off as a weirdo for waving, or not wave and stoically walk ahead as though I have somewhere Very Important to be or possibly a weird partial blindness disease that prevents me from seeing this person in my peripheral vision. So, to the Girl Who I Pass Outside of Moyer Everyday and Once Had an Italian Class With and See in the Mailroom Sometimes, and to the Boy On The Wrestling Team Who I Always Make Accidental Eye Contact With Outside the Dining Hall: Hi, my name is Rachel. I would really appreciate it if we could just agree not to acknowledge each other for the rest of our academic careers.

The second greatest challenge of going to a small school in a small town is that there’s not much to do. Sometimes the highlight of my week is going to Target to purposefully buy laundry detergent and accidentally buy some exotic-sounding fruit tea. I’ll never forget my first semester at Berg when my friends and I got all dressed up to go to Whole Foods and take pictures with various vegetables because there was nothing else to do. All that to say that sometimes I worry that I’m not getting the full college experience at Muhlenberg despite the exorbitantly high ticket price.

Now that I have a car and a slightly better attitude, I’m making a genuine effort to get off campus and even get out of Allentown, if possible. Last weekend I drove four hours to visit my friend Shelby at Syracuse University. Syracuse is pretty much the opposite of Muhlenberg College. It’s big, known for parties, and is surrounded by a city with bars, restaurants, and lots of things to do. It was a really nice weekend escape from the monotony of Muhlenberg. 

My friend Shelby lives in a tall orange and blue house with seven other people. Well, seven people, two squirrels who have since been caught and removed, and possibly the ghost of Lou Reed, who lived in the house when he attended Syracuse in 1960. The house is known for hosting house shows, which is part of why I visited on this particular weekend. At around 10pm, people started arriving and the bands started performing. Honestly, the best part of staying in the house where the party is happening is that you can pop in and out of the party whenever you need a break to, for example, eat a whole bunch of chips and french onion dip, or apply more blue eyeliner, or try to decide whether you like White Claws, or say fuck the White Claws and just take a tequilla shot. 

After the party at Shelby’s house we headed to a party for Shelby’s theater group. This was much more my speed. There was music and space downstairs for dancing, room for people to talk on the main floor, and a couch outside of the bathroom for me to awkwardly sit on while a couple waited for me to leave so they could start making out on said couch. I met some of Shelby’s friends and listened to a lot of gossip about people I don’t know and got complimented on my cow print shirt and witnessed many people making bad decisions and best of all, I left while I was still having fun and slept really well in Shelby’s bed. 

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The next day Shelby had to find someone to drive a truck (long story) and then she had to have a meeting about finding someone to drive a truck (longer story). While she did that I took a much needed nap and woke up feeling 80% less hungover and 100% more in desperate need of coffee. Shelby took me to a cute little coffee shop, a used bookstore, and an adorable plant shop called Found Things. I adore used book stores because I love books and I love not paying full price for things and I love all the silly non-book things they sell in used book stores, like postcards and tote bags. I ended up buying a David Sedaris book, an old Paris Review with drawings of dogs and a story by Zadie Smith, and three postcards. Not to brag, but the shop owner gave me the post cards for free and a discount on the books. Clearly my hangover groutfit and coffee breath was working for him. The plant shop was equally exciting. Syracuse is a nice little town but the sky is perpetually hazy, making everything look a little worn down and tired. This plant shop was a haven of bright green in a town of grey. I bet the woman who runs the shop has the highest serotonin levels in Syracuse, NY. She’s certainly getting the most nature therapy. I bought a cute green baby with white stripes for my friend Marlee’s birthday and Shelby bought a tiny green baby for herself. 

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Pretty much every house seemed to be throwing a party that night because there was a big basketball game happening, but Shelby and I weren’t feeling up to another night of drinking. Instead we went to a popular restaurant called Pastabilities and ate our weight in pasta and bread. I got wine and Shelby got ice cream and we set up shop on the couch in her living room watching trashy TV, specifically The Goop Lab on Netflix. All was fine and dandy until our Supreme Overlord Gwenyth Paltrow decided to show full close-up pictures of vaginas for our viewing pleasure. At that point Shelby and I switched off the TV and decided to talk about our feelings instead. 

Shelby and I were friends in high school, but we weren’t super close until after we graduated. Now we talk almost every day and bond over Allison Roman recipes, music, and the crippling fear of never finding true love. You know, girl stuff. That night we stayed up until 2am talking about gun control, of all things. I realized the next morning that Shelby and I spent pretty much two days straight together and I wasn’t feeling the least bit bored or stifled. That’s how you know you have a good friend- You can talk about everything together, endure full frontal vaginal onscreen nudity together, and spend 48 hours in close quarters all without losing your mind. We’re already planning our next trip to Brooklyn, although we have no idea what to do once we get there or where to stay. I’m not worried. We’ll figure it out.

I was recently hired by a local family to do some light housekeeping a few times a week. During the interview process they asked me about my hobbies, and I said (among other things) that I love to read and that my favorite author is Gillian Flynn. Flash forward to this past Monday when I was taking out their trash, vacuuming, and doing some other odd jobs around the house. I bent down to take the trash out of the trash can and was met with a pink sticky note. Its placement was obviously deliberate- It was carefully stuck to the lid of the trashcan leaving no possibility that someone had tried to throw it away and missed. The sticky note read “Coffee goes great with sudden death.” Not the most comforting message to get while alone in a stranger’s house. I went to empty the trash in another room and was met with another sticky note, this one reading “Daydreams can be dangerous.” I’m thinking that’s a pretty severe message to send to someone whose responsibilities include putting away Christmas lights- how much can really go wrong if my mind strays while I’m detangling the red lights from the green? It wasn’t until I came upon the next sticky note, this one ominously declaring “The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you” from atop the vacuum cleaner, that I realized my employers had placed Gillian Flynn quotes throughout the house where I would be sure to see them as a sort of thoughtful surprise. If Gillian Flynn hadn’t been a thriller and murder mystery author, this would have been adorable. Maybe at my next interview I’ll say my favorite author is Dr. Seuss. 

Recently I can’t stop thinking about the film Midsommar. I’ve watched all of the director’s cut clips on YouTube in the past couple days and can’t get enough of the bright, flowery aesthetic but I also don’t want to rewatch the gory head trauma scenes by myself since I could barely get through it with my friend Shelby in theaters. I decided to watch Ari Aster’s other film, Hereditary instead. By myself. In the dark. At night. You know, because Midsommar would have been too scary. I finished the movie right before my friends and I planned to go to a sleepover-themed performance art show. I cannot overstate the level of discombobulation and whiplash that comes from watching someone saw their own head off and then playing sharks and minnows in my pjs with a roomful of college students. But I will say that I had no trouble falling asleep that night. 

I babysat two young kids; one two-year-old boy and one six-year-old girl. Both were the type of hyperactive where they can entertain themselves by spinning in circles, talking to themselves, and occasionally ramming into furniture. The little girl had a picture book that came with a lamb puppet so you can act out the things the lamb does in the book. She insisted that I keep the lamb puppet on my hand while doing the “lamby voice” all night but never wanted to read the story. Eventually she wanted to be “King Lamby.”

“I’m the king and you have to call me whatever I want!”

“Yes, sire,” I replied.

“What? Who is sire? Call me Jennifer.” 

Then her little brother tried to climb into a kitchen drawer so King Jennifer’s commands went unheeded. 

The family that I work for is very Christian. The wife and I worked together around the house today and she asked me what my favorite class is that I’m taking right now. I told her I really like my Paradise Lost class in which we read… Paradise Lost. By Milton. 

“What’s that?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve read that one.”

“It’s uhhh…. It’s the story of Genesis from the perspective of Satan?”

Pretty sure her eyebrows hit the roof. 

This semester feels different. 

I just completed my first week of classes. First week of the semester, first week after eight months away from Muhlenberg, first week as an English major, first week navigating the dining hall as a vegetarian, first week with a new roommate, and first week with a new “I can and will take full advantage of what my school and my town has to offer” attitude. I’ve already been pushed farther out of my comfort zone than any of my previous semesters at Muhlenberg, and rather than feeling spread too thin or overly anxious like I predicted, I actually feel invigorated and motivated to keep up with these new habits I’ve created for myself. I’ve even done the unthinkable and changed my coffee order. For the past two years I have always, always ordered a tallcaramelicedcoffeewithroomformilkplease but today I changed my tune and ordered a mediumvanillaicedcoffeewithroomformilkplease which felt so wrong but tasted so right. 

Even more life-altering than my new coffee order is my new exercise routine. My exercise habits definitely peaked freshman year when I was enrolled in dance classes four days a week as well as twice weekly zumba classes and occasional yoga. I switched to running sophomore year but my enthusiasm eventually tapered off . It has been about a year since I worked out consistently. This semester my Monday and Wednesday classes don’t start until 2pm, giving me lots of time to go running and do any leftover homework from the night before. Fingers crossed that I actually keep this up without enacting some counterproductive reward system like letting myself eat a chocolate croissant to celebrate forty minutes of less-than-strenuous exercise. 

Speaking of chocolate croissants, being vegetarian at Muhlenberg is going pretty well so far. My salad intake has definitely spiked because it’s the easiest thing to eat when there aren’t any appealing vegetarian meals being served. Throw a couple falafel balls in there and you’ve got yourself a meal! Unfortunately I’ve been supplementing my diet of enjoyable but unsatisfying salads with chocolate chip cookies. You’ve heard of the freshman fifteen, get ready for the third year thirty. Whether I gain or lose it is anyone’s guess at this point. 

The biggest change is obviously my new major and all the new classes that come along with it. So far I’m feeling really enthusiastic about my schedule. I’m enrolled in Modern Poetry II, English Theory and Methods, Reading Paradise Lost, Global Renaissance, and Women’s Ensemble. I leave the first three classes feeling really energized and excited about what I’m learning. I’ve always loved analyzing poetry and literature- all my favorite books from middle school are highlighted and annotated. Hopefully my literary analysis has improved since the doodled hearts and angsty complaints in my eighth grade copy of Looking for Alaska, but my passion for reading and my desire to subject other people to my opinions on said readings hasn’t changed. Don’t be surprised if some of my thoughts on Sylvia Plath and Milton end up on this blog. It’s the best alternative to pulling a Hermione Granger and shooting my hand up in class every thirty seconds. 

On the other hand, I really dislike my Global Renaissance class. The professor keeps the lights off in class and lectures by reading off of a packet. It’s all I can do to keep from falling asleep. The class is also heavy on group work and ~creative~ assignments like a flipped class period where we teach the subject material. Honestly, I’d rather just take a test or write a paper. 

I’m also taking a more active role in Women’s Ensemble this semester. Now that I’ve changed my major and stopped taking voice lessons, Women’s Ensemble is my only performance and music based class. I’m really excited to be a part of the group assisting our choral director with the program for our upcoming concert in the Muhlenberg Fringe Festival: a celebration of women throughout the ages nearing the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. That’s another thing that will probably sneak its way into this blog because talking about women in music and all the ways women have been silenced through the ages is putting lots of thoughts in my brain.

Another big change is that I’m going to have a job this semester. I’ve been using care.com to find babysitting jobs and I’ve been hired by two families so far, third family pending. It’s nice to be earning money instead of hemorrhaging it all semester on Panera, Starbucks, and the farmer’s market. Maybe someday I’ll have a job with actual coworkers but for now I’m taking the one that pays above minimum wage and mostly in cash. 

Lastly, I’m doing this cool thing called Getting Off Campus which has already made me feel less trapped in the Muhlenbubble and more like a Person in the World. Last night my friend Marlee and I went to an open mic night at a new local cafe. There were two guitarists, one electric violinist, and three male stand up comedians telling jokes mostly about sex and drugs. Naturally I had to give a female perspective and do my stand up set about sex and drugs. I had what Brene Brown calls a “vulnerability hangover” and what I call “the expected amount of embarrassment one feels after talking about one’s vagina in front of a coffee shop full of strangers” when it was over, but I had a good time and more importantly I made people laugh! And groan. But mostly laugh. 

That’s all I’ve got for you so far! Coming up this semester: My 21st birthday celebration tomorrow (we’re going to a Mexican restaurant with fancy margaritas), more stand up shows, new extracurriculars, and shenanigans. 

I spent the first night of Hanukkah singing Christmas carols for alumni at my Lutheran College. 

Every year, my college puts on a Lessons and Carols service, an impressive collaboration between the choral department, the dance department, and the Chaplain’s office, made even more impressive by the miracle of 200 hungover college students wielding beeswax candles and narrowly avoiding lighting the backs of people’s heads on fire. This year, the final performance fell on the first night of Hanukkah. Not one of the dozens of Jewish students in any department skipped the Lessons and Carols service. Participation is not mandatory, per se, but who really wants to be the problem child who drops, thus breaking this great 50+ year Muhlenberg College tradition? (Of course, Jews have been celebrating Hanukkah much longer than Muhlenberg College has been doing… well, anything, but it’s Muhlenberg College, not Judaism, that will hopefully hand me a diploma in two and a half years.)

All that to say, skipping the concert was not an option. But neither was skipping Hanukkah. So I once again found myself in the uncomfortable situation of looking around and realizing that if I wanted something done about this, I would have to do it myself. This seems to happen more and more often as I grow up: I look around for an adult to come to my rescue and right the wrongs done by other adults, and find that I’m the adult I was looking for. Self-advocacy truly is the name of the game in college, and I assume that trend will carry on into the Real World. 

So I made a plan. I ambushed my choir director after the matinee before the post-show glow wore off, and explained that we simply must light the Hanukkah candles. In a service with over 200 candles already, what’s two more in a menorah? 

My choir director consulted with the Chaplain, who consulted with an advisor in her office, who said that we should probably ask the Rabbi to make sure that lighting a menorah in a church would not offend anyone or break any rules. This responsibility, of course, fell to me. Never mind that we had only an hour for our dinner break. In that hour I would track down the Rabbi, locate a menorah and two candles, and practice the blessings over the candles approximately seven billion times because should the Rabbi say yes, it would also be my responsibility to sing the blessings in front of the entire choir and audience as both God (and probably Jesus) listened in. 

Long story short, the Rabbi did say yes, and I did find a menorah and two candles, and I did sing the blessings over the candles. I even got to have dinner during my dinner break. 

Hanukkah is a minor holiday in the Jewish religion, and I am not an extremely religious Jew. But my Jewish identity is a large part of how I was raised and how I understand my place in the world. I hear so many stories about people going to college and “finding themselves.” That has not been my experience. (I go to school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. You won’t find much of anything out there, let alone your True Self.) I think rather than allowing me to “find myself,” college has acted as a filter, bringing forward the things that really matter to me and enhancing the qualities in myself that make me who I am. It is small experiences like these that have really made me question who I am and what I stand for. After all, as Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when?” If not now, at a midday Lutheran advent service in Nowheresville Pennsylvania, then when? Self-advocacy. It sure shows up in the darndest places. 

Since 2014, I have kept a list of every book I read and every new movie or TV show I watch. For the past three years I’ve kept the list in the notes section of my phone, but prior to 2017 it was kept in a spiral notebook covered in pictures of baby animals and models that I printed off of Tumblr. I have rules for myself: 

1. I must read twenty four books by the end of the year, at least two per month.
2. Plays count, but articles and coffee table books do not count. Neither do short stories, unless it is an anthology or collection of short stories turned into a book.  Audiobooks get a separate list.
3. It is okay to read only one book during one month and three books during another as long as I reach at least twenty four books at the end of the year.
4. Rereading books counts but rewatching movies or TV shows does not. 
5. Abandoned books do not count, even if I read the whole book except for the last page. (There was one exception to this rule in 2016 when I struggled through three quarters of Moby Dick for a summer reading assignment. This exception was made because reading Moby Dick is a form of torture and I deserved some recognition for even attempting it when most of the other students just went on Spark Notes. This is how I learned the rule “work smarter, not harder.)

I originally began the list as an incentive to read new books, as a reference for when people ask me for recommendations, and a reason to feel superior over people who didn’t read as much as me because I was one of those pretentious nerds in middle school who thought I was cool for not listening to pop music, watching Doctor Who, and reading books in my free time. Now that I’ve gotten over myself the list is just a fun way to compete with myself and see if I can top how many books I read the previous year, as well as a way to remember which authors I like. This year I’ve decided to use my list to compile Rachel Weisenthal’s Top Five Books of 2019. 

Before I start, a few disclaimers: 

1. Most of these books are old, and some of them are books that everyone already knows about. The reason for this is that I am perpetually late to the party. 
2. I mostly read fiction, and my favorite subgenre is fiction about women who go crazy and/or change their lives after realizing that their lives as mother/wife is not as fulfilling as they thought. 
3. I’m choosing my Top Five based on the impact these books had on my life, not necessarily based on which I would recommend the most or even which were the most fun to read. These are simply books that changed my life in some way.
4. This list goes in chronological order of when I read them, not in order of preference or impact.

Without further ado, here are my Top 5 Books of 2019!

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. Gillian Flynn’s books tick all the boxes for me: suspense, feminism, women going crazy, incredible writing… I read Gone Girl in 2018 and proceeded to read every Gillian Flynn book I could get my hands on. I chose this one over Dark Places, which I also read this year, because it was just the slightest bit more disturbing and intense. I seriously couldn’t put it down. I would especially recommend this book if you liked The Act on Hulu or if you have a super messed up relationship with your mother.

Wild By Cheryl Strayed. I read this book right after a really bad (really bad) breakup this past summer. In fact, Strayed’s other book titled Tiny Beautiful Things helped me realize that I needed to break up with my ex. Wild taught me that sometimes it’s important to be alone- which for me meant being single, and for her meant hiking 1,100 miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail. Not only did this book teach me about loneliness, but it also accompanied me through many of my first experiences with being purposefully alone: I read it in coffee shops by myself and outside the public library with a coffee and an almond croissant. Now, getting a coffee and reading outside the library by myself is one of my favorite morning routines. It doesn’t feel like something I do because I’m lonely, it feels like something I do that makes me feel happy and purposeful. 

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a columnist for the New York Times, best known for her profiles on celebrities such as Gwenyth Paltrow and Bradley Cooper. I’m tempted to call her profiles scathing, but that makes it sound like she’s purposely trying to be mean when really the excellence of her articles comes from how honest she is. You can tell that she really tries to be an impartial observer to these people’s behavior and lives, to enter into the interview process with a clean slate and without any preconceived notions. Once the interviewee reveals their true colors, Taffy does not hold back. Fleishman is her first novel, and it completely lived up to my expectations. I feel like I can’t adequately discuss what makes it so fantastic without spoiling a huge plot point so I’ll just say that everyone should read it. The huge plot point doesn’t come until over half way through the book, and I’ll admit that some of the first half can get a little repetitive, but please push through it and read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

Calypso by David Sedaris. This year I decided to switch majors from Theater to English. My confidence in that decision is owed in part to this book. David Sedaris writes the way I want to write: short, hilarious essays that perfectly blend my love for stand up comedy and my love for writing. This book made me laugh out loud so many times that I started to irritate my housemates and had to read it in my room with the door closed. I’ve read two more of his books since this one, and all of them have made me look like a crazy person for laughing out loud in coffee shops and on planes. I’ve also signed up for Sedaris’s master class and started writing almost every day so that I can maybe one day write like him. 

We are the Weather by Jonathan Safran-Foer. I got bamboozled by this book. I bought it thinking that it was a book about climate change, and for the first sixty two pages, it was. Then, on page sixty two, Safran-Foer reveals his thesis statement: The way to save the planet is to stop eating animal products. He then proved this point so effectively that I’ve been a vegetarian since the day I finished the book. I, who am known to rave against any sort of restrictive diet plan; I, who if left to my own devices will eat maybe one vegetable a week; I, who will order pork over anything else at any restaurant… am now vegetarian. Fuck you, Jonathan Safran-Foer. Fuck you and your heart-stoppingly gorgeous prose and your convincing arguments and your empathy.

So, those are my top five books of the year. I would like to give an honorable mention to Three Women by Lisa Taddow, The Girls by Emma Cline, and On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Next on my reading list: Love Love by Sun J. Woo.

Rachel’s back, tell a friend.

Fortunately and unfortunately, I am back in America. I got back Thursday night after thirteen hours of travel and I’m freshly reintegrated back into the US. After being away for so long, some things that I took for granted about America in general, my town specifically, and even my home seem different or even odd. I want to share these observations with you before they start to fade and everything starts to seem normal again. 

My first view of America after three months was through the plane window at night, and my first thought was “This is significantly less green than almost everywhere else I’ve seen from above.” My second thought was “Thank G/d I can get off this plane soon.” If Europe’s fields, mountains, and towns looked like a patchwork blanket, America’s lights, skyscrapers, and cities looked like a microchip. Obviously this is in part because I flew into DC, which is a large city with lots of buildings and lights, and it would be different if I flew into some Midwestern airport in a state where most of the area is used for farming. Of course there are green places in America. But I also flew into Paris, London, and Barcelona this past semester, all famously metropolitan cities, and none of them looked quite as Blade Runner as Washington, DC. 

My next observation is kind of a weird one, and certainly not something I ever would have thought about before going to Italy: The toilets in America contain a lot of water. Maybe it’s because I’m sort of on an environmentalism and sustainability kick right now, but the amount of water in American toilets seems super wasteful, especially compared to the amount of water in the toilets in Italy and Europe in general. Then again I definitely prefer American toilets over the sometimes gross and often confusing toilets in Italy, which can be anything from a hole in the ground with divots for your feet (true story) to a guessing game of where the toilet flusher may be. Sometimes it’s five feet to the left. Sometimes it’s a foot pedal. Sometimes it’s a string hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes there’s a string hanging from the ceiling that you think is a toilet flusher, but it’s actually an emergency alarm in case a disabled person falls in the bathroom, and you realize this just in the nick of time before pulling it in a very classy coffee shop. 

Speaking of sustainability, my third observation is that the on-the-go coffee culture in America creates a lot of unnecessary waste. I got a cappuccino every single day for three months in Italy, and I probably got a disposable cup twenty times maximum because the culture in Italy is to drink your coffee at the counter out of the mug it is served in. When I went to Starbucks yesterday morning with my dad, every single person who walked through the door got their coffee in a disposable cup. My dad and I chose to drink our coffee in the shop, and we still had to use disposable cups. I propose that Starbucks begins offering coffee in mugs to those who want to drink the coffee in the shop rather than take it to go. I also propose that Americans consider whether drinking your coffee in your car on the way to work is worth the environmental impact of throwing away a paper cup with a plastic lid every single day. Even when I was in a rush or on my way to class in Italy, I always had time to drink my cappuccino at the bar, partially because I budgeted that time into my morning commute and also because by midway through the semester I mastered the art of drinking a cappuccino in approximately three minutes flat. Don’t even tell me that you can’t spare three minutes to drink a coffee inside Starbucks rather than in your car to save a year’s worth of disposable cups. 

Zooming in a little bit, the next thing I noticed was how completely unwalkable my town is. My Dad’s house is kind of in the woods. We’re surrounded by trees (something I have a new appreciation for after living in nature-less downtown Florence) and live off of several windy two-way roads. It’s a five minute drive to the grocery store. Walking there would take at least twenty minutes and would most likely result in me being flattened by a car because there are no sidewalks, no street lights, and very poor visibility around turns. Public transportation is not an option either, as the nearest bus stop is a similarly dangerous twenty minute walk away. As someone who spent the last three months walking literally everywhere, the idea of having to get in the car anytime I want to go anywhere, even if it’s only five minutes away, is frustrating, depressing, and again, ecologically unsound. 

Zooming in quite a bit more, upon walking into my Dad’s house and later into my Mom’s house I was struck by how spotlessly clean everything is. The counters in both my parents’ houses are positively spartan. The floors are so clean they’re slippery. In my apartment in Florence I couldn’t walk around without socks on because my feet would be completely black with dirt and dust after just walking from my room to the bathroom. This was not because my housemates and I didn’t clean, it was just because Florence is kinda dusty in general. We had to open the windows for at least twenty minutes twice a day to avoid mold growth in the apartment. 

So, those are my somewhat pessimistic, probably very snooty observations of life in America after a semester away. Apologies to everyone around me who will undoubtedly have to put up with my “When I was abroad…” “Well in Italy we do this” “Well in Europe they do that” bullshit, it’s just that I have just come back from the best time of my life and everything else seems to pale in comparison. 

To end on a high note, I also got to eat two of my favorite homemade foods within hours of landing: my mom’s chocolate chip cookies and my dad’s sweet potato soup. America is not better than Italy or even better than most places, but my parents’ cooking is the best in the world. 

If I have learned anything these past few months it’s that my friends are the most important people in my life. I had a really (really really really) bad summer right before I came to Florence, and the only thing that got me through it was my friends. Maggie drove four hours to visit me in Maryland twice, one time bearing a care package full of things I love to make me feel better. Aubrey housed me at her internship in Massachusetts and braved the swarms of mosquitoes while I vented on her front porch. Marlee supported me via text when neither of us could make the six hour journey to hang out in person. Liz and I saw the sexiest revival of Oklahoma ever produced. Paige let me stress cut her hair because I had already stress cut my own at the beginning of the summer. Sloter came with me to parties that I probably shouldn’t have gone to and talked me through it afterwards. Shelby watched horrible children’s movies with me in my basement. All of those people helped me through one of the lowest points of my life, and now I’ve made indispensable friends in Florence during one of the highest points of my life. Friendship has taken a central role in my life in a way it hadn’t before when I was primarily concerned with romantic relationships. So I was looking forward to my trip to London with my college friends Maggie, Marlee, and Aubrey probably more than I had looked forward to any trip so far. Even though I’d seen all of them separately in their respective states and/or countries, we hadn’t all been in the same place since spring semester sophomore year. What better way to spend Thanksgiving than in a beautiful new city with three of my favorite people?  

I was so excited, in fact, that I stressed myself out all day about missing my flight. Despite needing to take a train to the airport and go through customs and navigate a new airport and stressing myself out to the point that I was shaking, I still somehow managed to get to the airport two hours early. Because I am my mother’s daughter.

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One train, one plane, and one bus ride later and I was in Maggie’s flat in London! In true obnoxious teenage girl fashion, Aubrey, Maggie, Marlee, and I screamed and collided in a four way hug on the streets of London when I arrived. We kicked off the trip at a nearby university bar called Wetherspoons. Tequila shots and fries were had by all. 

The next day was Thanksgiving! We decided to spend the first half of the day doing all the touristy things like sight seeing in Westminster Abbey and wandering around the Christmas market in Trifalgur Sqaure. Christmas markets are a new obsession of mine, which is unusual considering how Grinchy I usually am. As a child I used to reprimand the grocery store cashiers who wished us a Merry Christmas by viciously retorting, “We celebrate Hannukah.” Little Rachel would probably be less than pleased to see me skipping through Christmas markets, but she’d also probably be thrilled to know that I made it to London, which is where all of Middle School Rachel’s favorite YouTubers lived. 

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Anyway, we took in the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, Trifalgur square, and a highly enjoyable playground before heading back to Maggie’s flat to cook a Thanksgiving meal. We had big plans for Thanksgiving dinner- our menu included rice pilaf, lemon garlic chicken, roasted vegetables, vegan mac n cheese, apple pie, and mulled wine. Have you ever tried to have a lactose free, gluten free, partially vegan Thanksgiving dinner in a country that does not celebrate Thanksgiving? It was absolutely delicious, and even with all of the special dietary requirements we were able to keep the cost down to less than £10 per person. We ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine, and all took turns facetiming our families.

It was late when we ended the night and headed off to bed. This is a good time to mention that Aubrey and I were staying in an absolute shit hole of an airbnb. I had gotten lucky so far- even the hostel in France with its broken toilet, shower, and window had a comfortable bed and was relatively quiet at night- but this airbnb had no redeeming qualities. Our room smelled like cigarettes for the whole four days we stayed there. The walls and ceiling were so thin that we heard every step (and even more unfortunately, every coital experience) of our house mates. Aubrey’s bed didn’t have sheets or a pillow and the comforter obviously hadn’t been washed since the actual first Thanksgiving. The toilets and showers were so grimy that we held our pee every morning until we were at Maggie’s flat. I know Thanksgiving is supposed to be a day of gratefulness, and I certainly had a lot of things to be grateful for that day, but that airbnb was not one of them. If you’re thinking of staying at MiTul’s airbnb in Mile End, London… don’t. 

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Despite all that, we somehow got enough sleep to have a full day of fun in Soho the next day. We went to a vintage shop, a sex shop, a Harry Potter print shop, a gay bar, and a bagel shop, aaand that pretty much describes our friend group. We also happened upon another Christmas market in a very sophisticated shopping center with a specialty tea (specialTEE?) store, a Moomin store, and lots of ritzy clothing stores where Marlee and I tried on dresses worth at least as much as our plane tickets back to America. 

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Before coming to London we all made a collective bucket list, and having a real tea time was at the very top of that list. We found a really classy place called Dean Street Townhouse that did affordable(ish) tea times and tried our best to be posh and British. Tea time included a tea of our choice (obviously) and one of those super cool plate towers where each level has tiny little sandwiches and desserts. Everything was delicious and adorably dainty, but the creme de la creme was the scones with clotted cream and jam. I don’t know how something as plain as unflavored biscuits could be so delicious, but all of us were losing our minds over these damn scones. They were flaky and crumbly and just sweet enough that they weren’t bland. The clotted cream was, you guessed it, creamy, and perfectly cut the tanginess of the jam. I don’t even like jam usually but this jam was crazy good. 

Tea time is very deceptive because all of the food is tiny and light. You don’t think you’re eating that much and then all of the sudden you’re so full you can’t move. We could barely make it through the top tier of the little plate tower. I didn’t finish my dessert. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t finish my dessert. I’m usually the person who finishes other people’s desserts after they’ve said “I’m so full I don’t think I can finish dessert.”  It was also only 5pm when we finished our meal despite it looking like 1am outside, so we headed to the British Museum to walk off our food comas.

And yet somehow, come 9pm we were all hungry again. Crazy how that happens. We took the tube back into Soho and got a late dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown before heading back to the gay bar we stopped in earlier. 

We all had high hopes for the gay bar but I’m just gonna say it… it was disappointing. There was no deejay so they were playing full length music videos over the speakers and on screens around the dance floor, and I was not nearly inebriated to dance through the cut scenes in the middle of the Bye Bye Bye music video. We gave it the old college try, but the music was too bad and the crowd was too male (Where were the lesbians? We want lesbians!). We tried going to a normal club but it was too packed to dance and also there were only straight people there and lord knows straight people don’t know how to dance anyway. So we headed home.

But the night didn’t end there. Believe it or not, at 2 in the morning on a Friday the tube is mostly full of drunk people. None were drunker than the two drunk girls on our tube ride home. These girls- actually I can’t even call them girls because they were both at least 27 years old- these drunk women were the sloppiest, messiest drunk women I have ever seen. They were flinging themselves all over the poor man sitting next to them, scream-singing Magic by Pilot, asking where the bartender was and demanding water, and just generally being loud, drunk, possibly thirty year old women. I was blessed- nay, knighted- with a nickname by the louder of the two: Lady With the Cool Hat. We were sitting the perfect distance away from them so that it was funny and entertaining rather than obnoxious and gross. 

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Our final day in London started late. We took the tube back into central London and split up. Maggie and I went to the Tate Modern and Aubrey and Marlee toured the Globe Theater. The art in the Tate is the perfect type of modern art. It’s not as bizarre as the Biennale or as tame as Moma. It’s digestible, recognizable, and interesting enough that no eye rolling is necessary. My favorite part was the Guerilla Girls exhibit and my least favorite part was Dali’s Lobster Telephone which I have now seen on two continents and have been pissed off by both times because it is a truly ridiculous piece of art. It was also pretty cool to see Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays in person but that’s a somewhat cringey thing to say so let’s all pretend I didn’t say it. 

Our last activity in London was a Mamma Mia 2 viewing party complete with wine and ugly crying when Meryl Streep magically appears to sing My Love, My Life with Amanda Seyfried. Is there anything better than watching a cheesy movie cuddled up in bed with your best friends? No, there is not. 

I left London early the next morning sad to leave my college friends and excited to tell my Florence friends about my adventures. It’s weird and wonderful to travel from one country to another, neither of which I live in, and be able to consider both home because home is wherever my friends are.

So, where I last left off Dad and I were dangling off a cliff. 

Just kidding. But we were driving on dangerously narrow cliff side roads in the rain for a pretty long time. It was all worth it when we got our first glimpse of Orvieto. 

Our first glimpse of Orvieto was over the guardrail of a neighboring hill on a little pull-off area from the windy road. It looked exactly how I imagine Camelot must have looked. The Duomo sat glistening atop the hill like a tiara. There was even a rainbow. No seriously, there was a perfect little rainbow to the right of this stunning medieval city as if someone had painted it there to perfectly frame the view. We got back in the car and drove farther and farther up into Orvieto, my excitement mounting as we gained altitude because I had no idea what our airbnb looked like but it seemed to be right in the heart of one of the prettiest cities I had ever seen. 

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Pretty much everything was beautiful and amazing from when we arrived in Orvieto until when we left. Our airbnb was a medeival house in the heart of the city, with beautiful views out every window including the bathroom. Our hosts, Marco and Luisa, collect medeival pottery, which they displayed on a beam in the rafters. I hope one day I have the kind of money that allows me to put priceless works of medeival art on a precarious wooden beam twenty feet off the ground. After talking to Marco and Luisa and settling in, Dad and I explored the town.

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The Duomo was stunning, even in the dark. Every Duomo I’ve seen has had something that sets it apart; Orvieto’s Duomo is unique because of the intricate carvings on its facade. Google tells me that the carvings are called Bas Reliefs. I’m just bas relieved that I wasn’t the poor guy who had to carve all those tiny faces into solid rock (sorry). 

We planned on having dinner at a local restaurant, but ended up having appertivo at a cute little coffee and drinks bar. When we ordered our drinks (a moscow mule for me, a mango passion for Dad) the waiter asked if we wanted a snack with it. We were expecting potato chips or something like that, so we said yes. They ended up bringing a whole tray of tea sandwiches, nuts, and small snacks. We didn’t end up going to dinner that night. 

On Tuesday we spent the morning in Orvieto getting a better look at all of the beautiful homes and scenery and then packed up to drive to Terme di Saturnia, a bougie hotel near the thermal baths of Saturnia. Once again the drive was treacherous and the rain was even worse, so when we finally pulled up to the hotel it looked a little worse for wear. The rain had made everything muddy, and it wasn’t exactly the most desirable weather conditions to go outside and swim. But there was no denying that it was a beautiful resort and they had free chocolate in the lobby, so no complaints from me. 

The thermal baths in Saturnia are warm, ex-volcanic waters with therapeutic properties. They’re very beautiful and they smell like the worst farts in the world. It was very relaxing to sit in the warm water and watch all the rich people bob around on floaties and ignore the fart smell, but it also made me feel like a hard boiled egg that has been put in a bowl of water in the sink to cool down. The hard boiled egg-ness was intensified by the fact that a lot of people had their hair back in hair nets, and so physically resembled eggs as well as smelling like them.

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The best part of Terme di Saturnia was the food. (Are you sensing a theme here, readers? We all know the real reason I studied in Italy is just to eat my way through the country.) A three course dinner was included in our stay. I ordered burrata (again), steak, and tiramisu (again). Dad ordered seafood salad, ragu, and tiramisu (we have a problem). I wasn’t hungry again until 3pm the following day. 

Our next stop was San Gusme, a tiny town of only 100 people right outside Siena. I know I’m really harping on the scary driving conditions and it’s probably getting old, but this drive was the worst. We were literally driving through clouds. Not fog, clouds. It was raining so hard that we were the rain. Dad pulled over a bunch of times just to take a mental break from all of the crazy turns and gear shifting. We were in desperate need of a coffee break, so Google maps helpfully directed us to a closed laundromat (???) and a church in the middle of nowhere (????). By the time we finally got to San Gusme we were more than ready to get the hell off of the roads. 

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Here are the highlights of San Gusme: 

1. Our airbnb host brought us a beautiful platter of meat, cheese, and biscotti.
2. I saw more cats than humans.
3. Dad decided to move to San Gusme bring the population count up to 101. 
4. A mean lady yelled at me for standing on her garden wall.

It probably took you longer to read that list than it did for us to walk from one end of San Gusme to the other. 

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Early the next morning we left for our final destination: Siena. I’ve been to Siena three times now, but it’s the perfect stop on the way back to Florence and I knew the Duomo would blow Dad’s mind. We went to all the hot spots: Nannini’s bakery for ricciarelli cookies, Piazza del Campo, and the Duomo which, as I hoped, blew Dad’s mind. During this whole trip, he was consistently impressed by the tiny details: the sculptures of the popes’ faces in the Duomo, the frescos on the ceiling where we saw the opera, the quality of every ingredient in the market. He thinks the attention to detail and the amount of care involved in really small things is one of the things that makes Italy better than America. Also bidets. 

That afternoon we finally headed back to Florence which was good because I had run out of clean socks. Our final activity of Dad’s trip was a food tour in Florence. 

What to say about this food tour. It was fun for the first little while! The tour guide was a very kind woman from Rome who walked slower than the oldest Italian nonna. Painfully slow. The other people on the tour were nice for the first little while! There were three young couples, a solo traveler from Australia, and us. The food was good for the first little while! We had gelato, chocolate, salami, and cheese. Then we got to the wine and oil tasting portion of the tour when apparently, unbeknownst to me, someone ordered a side of casual antisemitism with their wine. Someone had mentioned that they were traveling to Venice, and I mentioned the restaurant in the Jewish quarter that I really liked. This opened up a conversation about those horrible Hasidic Jews who are Taking Over New Jersey, where two of the couples live.

 “We call them the walkers,” one of the women said. “And we let our dogs bark at them because they’re always walking past our window. We practically live in Little Israel.” 

“I swear they hang up signs in Israel telling the Jews to move to our town!” another woman replied. “I hear they’re taking over Brooklyn!” 

I thought of a billion scathing retorts approximately 90 seconds too late. Dad and I got the fuck out of there as soon as possible, had another glass of wine, and ended the night early. Maybe not the best way to end a really fantastic vacation, but we still had the next morning to end on a high note before Dad got on his flight home.

So now Dad is gone and I’m settling back into my normal routine in Florence, a routine with significantly more down time and significantly less tiramisu. I feel really lucky to get along so well with my dad that we can travel together for a week without even a tiff. I feel really lucky to be able to travel at all, not to mention stay at beautiful places and eat delicious food. This week has reaffirmed my desire to travel as much as possible, but it has also made me dread going home a little less because I have a wonderful family to go back home to.

My Dad and I are alike in many ways. We both journal, love audiobooks, and drink too much coffee. We both self-identify as hippies, although in him this manifests as New Age spirituality and in me this manifests as a fondness for tie dye and an obsession with kombucha. We both are overly attached to our morning routines and prefer to go to sleep early. But one way that we really differ is that I am a planner and he is not. 

Dad got to Florence on Thursday afternoon with no plans except a hotel reservation for one night and a dinner reservation I had made for that evening. The rest of the week was wide open. We had a vague plan to “go south” to escape the heavy rain that had been falling pretty much since the beginning of November in Florence, but we didn’t know where or how far “south” was, how we were going to get there, or what to do along the way. This has set us up for some really great adventures and amazing experiences. I’ll start with dinner on Thursday night, at a restaurant recommended to me by my mom, who was recommended by her friend. 

The restaurant was called La Giostra and it was absolutely amazing. It doesn’t open until 7pm (that’s how you know it’s legit), and when we walked inside for our 7:30 reservation it was like being transported to another world. The ceiling is covered in twinkly lights. The tables and chairs are tightly packed in to accommodate as many hungry guests as possible. The menus are completely in Italian. Dad and I decided to just order whatever our waiter recommended, which turned out to be burrata for the antipasti, spaghetti bolognese, fresh fish, and tiramisu. When the waiter brought the burrata Dad and I looked around hoping that someone else had ordered it too so we could copy them and see how we were supposed to eat it. Do you spread it on bread? Eat it with a spoon? Once we tried a bite all concern for “supposed to” went out the window. Sometimes something is so delicious that you can eat it with your hands, with chopsticks, out of a shoe; it literally doesn’t matter as long as you can continue to put the delicious thing into your mouth. The burrata was rich, creamy, sweet, and even more amazing when paired with the honey and walnuts they had provided us. The primi were incredible too, but the real stars of the show were that burrata and the huge piece of tiramisu for dessert. 

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Dad found an opera and wine tasting event on airbnb for our second night in Florence. The two of us and a really nice young couple tried five (FIVE!) very large glasses of wine and some really funky appetizers including spinach flan and organic ravioli. Dinner conversation ranged from the effectiveness of bidets to the joys of beekeeping to the importance of participating in your local government. The four of us then walked (in an impressively straight line for having just had five glasses of wine) across the street to a tiny church for an hour of selections from famous Italian operas. There were two performers who sort of looked and dressed like the stepsisters from Cinderella. They were both extremely talented, although Dad and I agreed that the soprano had the It Factor over the mezzo. When she really let it rip, it felt like the sound waves were blasting through your brain. All in all it was an extraordinary night in every sense of the word- it was both extremely out of the ordinary from what we would normally do, and really really fun. 

The next day we decided to get a rental car and start our journey “south.” I chose our first stop: the small medieval town of Monteriggioni. It was about one hour away, a good practice drive for Dad to get his bearings with the manual transmission and Italian roads. About ten minutes into the journey we made a wrong turn and ended up on the narrowest, steepest road I have ever seen in my life. It was one-way, obviously only meant for whoever’s villa rested at the top of it. I was gripping my seatbelt for dear life and praying that no cars came at us from the opposite direction because that would mean someone would have to drive backwards and it sure as hell would not be us. But Dad handled it like a champ and soon we were taking even windier roads up to Monteriggioni. 

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Monteriggioni was way tinier and emptier than I expected, but still charming because of its old medieval walls and sweeping views of the Tuscan hills. Dad and I roamed around (as much as you can roam in a town that’s only 570 meters long), had a delicious meal, and hopped back in the car just as it started to rain. After a stressful decision making process that took so long we had to revalidate our parking ticket, Dad booked a random hotel for the night and we started driving… north. In the exact direction of Florence, which we were trying to drive away from. It took us about fifteen minutes to realize our mistake, but even if we hadn’t we would have been forced to turn around anyway as traffic came to a dead standstill in front of us. We watched, confused, as cars started turning around and driving in the opposite direction in the middle of a crowded highway. It was kind of a mindfuck to see everyone speed off in reverse, turn their cars around, and just… drive the wrong way down a major highway. We followed suit and frantically googled towns that were south and under two hours away. We settled on Grosseto, which is apparently the capital of Maremma, the coastal region where I got the worst sunburn of my life.

By the time we got to Grosseto it was dark, we were sick of being in the car, and it was still steadily raining. We split up to decompress: I journaled and had a cocktail at a really cute bookstore, and Dad got a slice of pizza. We both separately happened upon Grosseto’s Duomo and attended a few minutes of the mass that was going on inside. We ended the night early by eating potato chips and answering some random journal prompts that Dad had written down in the room. 

Dad and I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to see cool stuff and do cool things. We walked around Grosseto and appreciated the Duomo in the daylight (breaking news: things are prettier when you can actually see them), wandered around the ruins of an old fortress, and got coffee in an adorable little cafe. We made a plan to drive twenty minutes away to a regional park for some hiking before choosing our next destination. 

Well, that plan fell through. The park guide straight up laughed at us when we said we wanted to go hiking, citing the fallen trees, flooded ground, and early sunset as reasons why venturing into the park would be a no-go. Not wanting to be the stupid American tourists whose hubris gets them crushed under a tree and featured on Italian nightly news, we retreated back to our car to figure out what to do next. We had no semblance of a plan; we were using google maps to find names of cities south of Grosseto and then Wikipedia searching the attractions in each city and cross referencing with availability on hotel.com and airbnb. At one point we almost booked a hotel for a city whose greatest attraction was its industrial power plant. This is where my planning, order-seeking brain and Dad’s the-universe-will-guide-us brain started to battle it out a bit. I felt anxious about not knowing where we were headed next, guilty that Dad had flown all the way to Italy just to sit in a rental car in various cities googling where to drive, and frustrated that our past two stops had been somewhat underwhelming. We finally ditched our vague idea of going “south” and decided to drive east to Orvieto instead because our family friends live there during the summer. It was two hours away and I was still a humming ball of anxiety so we searched along our route for a place to get some lunch and, more importantly, some wine. This led us to a gas station restaurant.

Yes, a gas station restaurant. In America this would have sent us running for the hills, and if we had not run for the hills we would have spent the rest of the day running for the toilet. But this is not America, this is Italy. So of course we had a fantastic lunch of pasta, tiramisu, and red wine that calmed me right the fuck down and turned the day around. We got back in the car feeling full, relaxed, and happy. We even turned “avoid highways” on google maps so we could enjoy the scenic route along the way.

Actually, to say the route was scenic doesn’t really do it justice. The roads were insane. Hairpin turns and switchbacks down the sides of huge hills and back up again, past tiny overlooks into the valleys and through misty fog or possibly clouds, we were high enough up that we weren’t totally sure which. If anyone aside from Dad had been driving I would have been… come se dice… shitting myself. But he did a great job and I alternated between deejaying, navigating, and taking in the view out my window. 

This post is already too long, so I’m going to leave it on a cliff hanger (Get it? Because we were driving in the rain on the side of a mountain… like near a cliff…) Will Rachel and Jason survive the crazy Italian roads and crazy Italian drivers? Will Orvieto live up to their expectations? Tune in next time to find out.