Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently traveling around Europe. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
Cities have honeymoon periods, I’ve been told. Travel somewhere new, and quite often you’ll love it and start dreaming about living there — until, two weeks or so later, the rose-tinted glasses come off and you start noticing all the things you don’t like about the place.
That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. My personal experience has actually been mostly the opposite. Often, I don’t like a city much when I first get there — then later decide maybe I love it. Call it prolonged jet lag, call it a temporary maladjustment syndrome — whatever the name for it, the fact is it can take me a while to warm up to a place.
Take Rome, for example. This place wasn’t love at first sight for me. The cab drivers: known to be some of the rudest in the world! The public transportation: not great for a major western European city, with only three train lines plus a rarely-on-time swarm of buses! The city center: overrun by tourists (like me!) and as a result, chaotic and stressful to elbow your way through! The customer service outside the city center: basically nonexistent especially if you don’t speak Italian! The weather: cold in early spring and prone to torrential rainstorms — with hail!
The last straw: The shampoo at my Airbnb gave me dandruff! I started wondering why I’d ever thought it would be fun to live in Rome for a month.
Then, spring sprung. Life got dryer, warmer, easier. I went shopping and got new shampoo! I found a relatively reliable tram that dropped me off at the north end of the city center, from where I could walk pretty easily to wherever I needed to go! I learned to start conversations with “Parli Inglesi?” to which many Italians replied with a relieved yes — previously they just hadn’t known what language to try speaking to this Asian-looking person.
In fact, many were pretty eager to practice their English. Last week, I went to a happy hour for expats — to find more Italians there than expats. Many had peripatetic pasts and just wanted to hang out with fellow lovers of travel. There was the girl from Milan who’d just moved to Rome from Barcelona with her South African husband in tow. There was the Russophile who’d lived in Siberia for a while but now taught English to junior high kids. And there was me, in town for a month for no particular reason —
Life often feels like it’s going by too quickly, but at times it feels like it’s been going on a long, long time too. There are so many of us in this world, thinking, feeling, staying, moving, sometimes crossing paths, sometimes missing each other by a day, a mile, a whim —
Rome is beautiful, and also ugly. It’s the beauty, in fact, that makes it ugly, and vice versa. The ancient architecture all over the city is gorgeous to behold — and makes it impossible to build out rail lines to fully connect the city. Rome’s unique history makes it a bucket list destination — for so many people that the city center is perpetually jammed up with tourists. Despite this, Rome’s retained its Italian culture — to both the delight and chagrin of American visitors who wonder at the lack of toilet seats in the bathrooms, the plasticky nonabsorbent texture of the paper napkins at restaurants, the indifferent attitude of service employees who don’t have to rely on tips for economic survival.
You can’t have beauty without the ugly. I think we often long to find contradictions that tend not to coexist: to visit amazing places that have somehow remained untrammeled by tourists, to own gorgeous objects that are somehow inexpensive despite having remunerated the people who’ve made them with a fair wage, to meet very attractive people who’ve somehow remained blissfully unaware of the way their beauty affects everyone around them.
The things I don’t like are the very things that make the things I do like possible — a fact I still often have to remind myself of.
And you? What beauty comes from the ugly in your life?
This weekend, I’m off to Naples, the land of Elena Ferrante, my writer hero. Have tips for what I must see or eat? Let me know —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
What it’s like to drive in Rome. An American guy who moved to Rome shares his experience, with humor: “They also triple park. Huh? Yes, triple park. Two cars — not one, but two — will pin another against a curb. When I hear a horn blow for five minutes straight, it’s not stuck. It’s the guy with the car on the inside curb. Eventually, two guys will appear and release his car like a caged animal and all three go their separate ways, without profanity or hand gestures, as if this was part of their day, which it is.”
Why are people having less sex? That’s a more accurate title for this article, which isn’t so much about loneliness as about declining rates of sexual activity in the U.S. Experts blame many factors, ranging from sexism to “hostile” architecture.
When professors teach for free. “After protests, U.C.L.A. took down a job posting that offered no pay. But it turns out colleges often expect Ph.D.s to work for free.”