Practical Advice when traveling in Florence

I don't remember much about our trip to Florence. I think this is primarily because it was a few years ago when our lives existed in a different sort of plane. Tonight, I wandered upstairs and snuggled my three year old because she was scared of the sound that the steamer in her room makes. We've got the steamer set up to mitigate the chest cold/head cold/gastrointestinal cold that's had us all in various types of misery for eight days now. My ear hurt so bad the other night that I considered tearing it off, and I almost woke Steph up to tell her that I'd like to die if I was ever in that amount of pain for longer than a couple of days. I snuggled the little girl on the grounds that for the past three days she's pretty much shoved me away and asked for her mother or her nana. The other day she was walking around in her new slippers and said, "I don't know who got me these?" "I did," I said. "Oh," she answered before asking me to help her downstairs to find people she likes more.

I don't remember now, the flight over to Italy. I am fairly certain that we didn't pack in fifteen bags and haggle with the attendant over the cost of a pack and play. A haggling which did take place on our most recent flight to CA. We would have threatened to never fly United again, but we use their credit card for everything and are beholden to them, and so we just voice our displeasure by getting put on hold with their call center, which is the modern equivalent of voicing your displeasure with the status quo.

I seem to remember the flight having no air vents. I think that's what happens when you get the cheapest ticket possible; you literally get the cheapest ticket possible. I don't know how much air vents cost on a plane, but I'm guessing it's somewhere below a billion, which turns out to be the temperature in a sealed air cabin when you're traveling with a bunch of other cheap skates who are probably planning to spend the week in a youth hostel or sleeping on their friend's couches, the layabouts. The only thing worse than traveling in such a way is knowing that you're one of them.

If my memory serves me correct, the flight took us to Spain. To Madrid, which is renowned for its shopping and not being Barcelona. Not being Barcelona is one of the things that Madrid is a little touchy about, so they make up for it by serving Jamon at every single vendor in the airport. The problem was, we were stuck in the Madrid airport for eight hours while our airline resolved a strike. In Europe, because they are evolved, someone is always on strike. It might be the train drivers, or the subway operators, but you can be sure that someone, somewhere is on strike and isn't going to take it anymore. Our free market system doesn't go in for such chicanery. We're happy to break the backs of unions by bringing in cheaper labor or shipping jobs off shores. We're evolved. In barbarous Europe though, you have to wait hours for your flight.

At first, we were excited by the airport in Madrid. They had little faucets specifically designed to fill up refillable water containers. We don't go for that in America, because you can just buy another bottled water, or now, one of those fancy glass bottles of water that has flecks of gold in it or whatever, I haven't tried the bottles myself, but I'm pretty sure it's not Platinum. Anyhow, we were excited that they saw fit in their kindness to allow you to refill your water bottles. Of course, by the time we'd spent our eight hours there, refilling our bottles three separate times, we understood that it was more a measure of endurance, like an oasis in a desert.

I can tell you that being trapped in the Madrid airport is not such a bad thing if you love Jamon. I'm meh on the cuisine. However, the airport is most decidedly in favor of it. Every single place, be it a hole in the wall, a pretzel place, or a fine dining establishment was likely to have some sort of Jamon offering as its main course. I know because I walked the length of our single concourse, which turns out to be about half the width of Spain. It is my understanding, from my brief stay there, that the Madrid airport can be seen from space in a slightly more prominent way than the Great Wall of China. Years ago, when I was there, it had a great yellow awning type cover that made it look like a bit like a circus, which is nice, there is nothing a person covets so much in an airport than the feeling that everything has been hastily thrown together.

We spent our eight hours together in the airport in the way of great intellectual of the past, Americans abroad in a foreign land now capable of dissecting with alacrity the American dream they've left behind, which is to say, we kept staring at the flight tracker watching our flight move back further and further before moving to a different seat to eat more jamon. From our seats, we discussed the vagaries of flight times and the general unfairness of Iberian airlines conspiring to delay our first ever flight into Italy. It is not so much that the delay occurred, delays occurs all the time for perfectly viable reasons, but for it to have occurred on our first flight to Italy seemed an injustice on the scale of the Mosaic flood for people who weren't really all that bad.

As we filled up our water bottles and sat exhaustedly, our feet up on the bags, I talked about how I'd like to return one day to Spain. Not to Madrid, which I'd heard was, at best, not Barcelona, but to Barcelona of the Basque region, or somewhere warm and dry. "We will," Stephanie said. And now, years later, reflecting back on her statement, I can only assume that she meant in the afterlife. Perhaps she's planning on having my body sent to Spain for burial? I should ask her. Just know, if for some reason you're put in charge of my remains, I want to be buried underneath the airport in Madrid, with a ham sandwich on my stomach.

All of us have places that we'd like to go. Places that we've seen in pictures or on calendars, some close enough that we could drive there, some that would be hours and hours away even by plane. I'm not sure what it says about anyone, the places they want to go. Perhaps it means nothing at all, just one more expression of humanity's desire to be anywhere but where they are. It's hard not to think that we are comprised instead, sad though it may be, of the places we have been, the bits of dust beneath our fingernails, the memories imprinted in grey matter, the ache on cold days of certain bones. But we have traveled nowhere, been nothing. How can this be? It has always been this way.