It’s been quite a bit since I’ve written one of these…and if you go back to the first one, the writing was not so good…so I’d expect the same here as I get back into this. It’s not that I haven’t been adventuring, but I have been finding it difficult to sit down and write. This month, there have been a few milestones…and humans have the easiest time starting things when there is a milestone so it seemed like the perfect time to start writing here again.
This month, I turned 30 and moved out of Austin…to live in Italy. Over the last two years of bloglessness, I have been practicing Italian. After meeting a few Italians via volleyball and other friends, I started coming to Italy every other month to practice the language and see the country. The more time I spent here, the more I felt aligned with my heritage. Learning Italian in Texas is a bit difficult and I was becoming a bit exhausted with America and missing adventure. I did some work to get all of my documentation lined up and am going to get my Italian citizenship by descent while I live here. Outside of that little update, this blog post is going to cover the trip out to Italy.
At the beginning of August, Ryan came down to Texas and I did a little farewell tour to Austin. I spent some time with all the various friends I met, ate at all of my favorite restaurants and sold a lot of my things. Needless to say, I spent too much time doing fun stuff and packing didn’t take priority. Ryan and my dear friend Becca did all of the packing while I lolligagged around last minute. One day, I’ll stop procrastinating…but as long as it keeps working out, probably not. We attached a trailer to my Encore and set off on the twenty four hour drive back to Cleveland. Pretty boring drive, but it preempted the three weeks I got to spend in Cleveland with my family and enjoying the city for the first time in summer in four years. The three weeks were mostly filled with family time, volleyball, a dadchelor trip to West Virginia, and a wedding celebration.
When I decided to move to Italy, I had no idea where I wanted to live(spoilers: I still don’t), so I came to Italy a bunch to check it out. To finish my citizenship, I have to have a lease and have to stay in the same city for four to six months while they finish all of the processing. I decided that I should spend a month somewhere while I get comfortable being in a foreign country before signing a lease, so Ryan agreed to spend the month in a small town we visited earlier this year called Cesena. We came here in February to visit our friend Andrea that we met via Beachbox Camps and he agreed to train us if we lived here for a month. Last time I was in Europe, I realized I had been to twenty seven countries. This gave me the idea to hit three more countries before we got to Cesena so that I’d hit my thirtieth country just after my thirtieth birthday. The battle plan was to leave Cleveland on August 29th.
Like any of my travel stories, they don’t go as planned. I spent the day of the 29th saying goodbye to my family and finishing up packing (see earlier for other procrastination references). An hour before I was supposed to meet Ryan at the airport, the flight got delayed by two hours. No big deal, just some more time to spend with family. After clicking into the app to check on the exact time of the delay, I saw another message stating that the delay pushed us into a storm, so the flight was canceled. After interacting with support for the booking site and the airline, nothing had changed. They booked us for a flight the next evening, which would have us in London later than we were even planning to stay there. Ryan headed to the airport and got an agent to get us another flight in the morning to Oslo, Norway so we wouldn’t miss our plans there. Once that was settled, we spent the evening playing Mario Party and eating pizza with my family, so overall, not too bad.
Prior to leaving, my dear sweet nephew, Max, couldn’t help but be a little plague bearer (because that’s what children do) and so I left Cleveland pretty congested. We got to the airport the next morning, no problems and headed off to an eight hour layover in New York. My work wife, Chelsea, also happened to be in New York for the weekend and was heading to Europe that afternoon. The plan was to hop into the city, hang out and then take an Uber back to the airport with Chelsea since she was heading to the same airport. What I didn’t plan for was the pressure change of a plane descending to smash my eustachian tubes with the congestion, making me feel like I permanently had an earbud in my ear. So basically, my few hours in New York were spent feeling like I had my head underwater and I couldn’t hear anything. Regardless, we met up with Chelsea and her friend, Rachel for drinks with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and wandered around the city for a few hours.
The taxi and flight were pretty uneventful. At some point in the air, the pressure had changed enough that I was able to clear my ears and finally feel normal again. It was all a ruse though. As we descended, my ears became congested again, but this time both of them. This time accompanied by a brutal pressure in my head. Not a fan, but not too bad.
Bring Me Your Best
Of all of my travels, I have only checked two bags. One when I moved to Austin…and one for this trip. I thought I could just ship a package to Italy after I arrived…but right before I left, I found out that would cost me upwards of fifteen hundred dollars. So this trip, I had my regular travel bag (around thirty pounds), my Yeti laptop bag (another twenty) and a large checked bag (almost exactly fifty pounds). This is important because it dictated some of our movement for the week.
Back to the actual trip, we landed in Oslo, got all of our bags to a nice hotel that our friend Jenny booked for us. With little to no sleep and both of my ears congested to the point where I couldn’t hear, Ryan and I head off to a tournament. We ubered to the event and walked up. We got lucky and it was around 75 degrees, which is rare for an evening in Oslo at the end of August. We made it a priority to make it to this tournament because the Olympic gold medalists are from Norway and they would be playing. This was also a threes tournament where you randomly got different teammates of various skill levels every game.
Exhausted and with the inability to hear, being social wasn’t really on the menu. Everyone there spoke English well but were obviously defaulting to Norwegian. I got the chance to play against both olympians, but it’s always difficult with random teammates to play a solid game. Ryan didn’t get so lucky. Seven or eight games later and the tournament came to an end. We stuck around to play a game with our friend Jenny and Adrian that we met in Zanzibar earlier this year. After the event, we roamed our way back to the hotel. It was around 10pm…everything was mostly closed. We tried ordering things but didn’t have texting in Norway…so ended up getting pizzas and kebabs. Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs, so we definitely got a bit too much.
The next day, we stored our bags and headed to the Oslo city center. My favorite thing to do is go to a single point of interest and then just walk as we find other things. So we headed to an area of Oslo called Barcode and roamed around. The architecture of Oslo is gorgeous, it’s like a mix of modern and older European. It’s a bit odd because they will make buildings that look like older European cities but are obviously new. The city is surrounded by water and nature, which is always a beautiful backdrop. There are also places to sit everywhere, which seems so odd. Around 3pm on a Thursday, the area was full of people just sitting around. Norway has a really interesting situation because it was one of the poorest countries in Europe before they found all of the oil. After getting all of that oil money, they made a lot of decisions with the good of the people in mind, which seems a bit wild coming from America. Every citizen has a large pension set for them and they did a lot to improve the quality of life there, knowing that eventually the oil will run out. It seems crazy that like 5 Norwegians didn’t take all that money but I guess we don’t all capitalism so well. Anyways, after that, our friend, Adrian, met up with us and we walked around the city a bit more. He left because he had to get ready for a Rome trip and we realized we had walked about 15 miles so we headed back to the hotel and ate some food.
The next day, we had a flight around 6pm, so we went to find some Norwegian waffles with yogurt and strawberry on one half (amazing) and caramelized cheese on the other (not so much). After we tried this, the weather turned gloomy. Our hotel was actually attached to an IMAX and despite my deep love of movies, I had never been to one. Ryan doesn’t really love movies, but it’s raining, so too bad. We looked up some movie times and NOPE was playing in IMAX and ended right at the time we needed to leave. So we packed our stuff, brought it to the main desk and headed over. Norway apparently treats their concession stands like a convenient store filled with snacks, which is pretty cool, and after posting that, I found out apparently a lot of Europe does too. We saw this movie, it was great, and then hopped in a taxi on our way to the airport.
A Land of Castles and Friends
Next stop: Estonia. This one has been on the list for a while. We’ve met a lot of Estonians via Beachbox Camps, since they’re neighboring countries. I had heard it was all castles, so what’s not to love. The part we were a bit quieter about (shout out Americans lack of geographical knowledge) is that Estonia borders Russia and Russia wasn’t so happy with them when we arrived. I wasn’t particularly worried, but no reason to make loved ones worried. Anyways, we flew in, walked around some castles and found the closest open restaurant….an American themed pub. Whatever, food is food. The next day our friend, Merike, picked us up with her boyfriend and we met her beach volley partner and some others from Beachbox Camps at the indoor facility they play at. Upon walking in, I noticed it looked strikingly similar to the one in Riga, Latvia, which I found out is because it is owned by Renars, who runs Beachbox Camps. Small world. We played an hour or two of sideout and then Martin gave us a tour of Tallinn.
During the tour, we stopped for some lunch and walked by the seaside. They had some historic battleships that we were just allowed to climb all over. I always enjoy these things because Americans would die or break things if you let them do this. As proof, I immediately climbed into a gunner seat to mess around. Other than this, jet lag was starting to hit me and Estonia doesn’t share the same love of seats as Norway, but luckily we found some public bean bag chairs overlooking the sea to get some fresh air. After this, we saw some other volleyball places and then went to relax in the hotel. A few hours later, we ordered a straight up American portion of food and met our friends for a board game night. Other than Mafia, I haven’t played board games in any other language and we immediately realized that if we played in English, we likely hold an advantage, but if we played in Estonian, we just can’t play. After some solid hospitality and friend time, it was time to head home to sleep before an early flight.
We flew into Venice and grabbed a train to Rimini, the Myrtle Beach of Europe. One chill night here walking along the beach before heading to Cesena for our month long stay. After this, I spent the month in Cesena, hit Belgium to see Amine and my thirtieth country. At the end of the month, I headed back to Austin for 5 days and immediately flew back to Spain for Beachbox Mallorca. These things will just be covered in an IG post in favor of writing more vaguely about Italy and living here. Thanks for reading while I knock the rust off. Ciao ciao!
