By oncptime
Italy, the land of bistecca, and cozze, gelato and prosciutto has—miraculously—turned me into a vegetarian. Whenever my dietary restrictions come up in conversation I have a soft chuckle to myself before regaling my listeners with the harrowing tale of how I singlehandedly liberated an entire farm’s worth of innocent woodland creatures from a sadistic, blood-worshiping cult/sleeper-cell not two blocks from my home. The sick bastards planned on eating those doe-eyed does. Monsters.
Thing is though, I’m the farthest thing from a vegetarian. Unless barking or meowing, animals aren’t people, they’re food. The sadistic cult gathering I crashed? It was a barbecue festival. They wanted €30 to get in. Monsters.
I get away with telling stories like this primarily because these days I’m running on little more than bread, water, and the occasional bowl of Budget brand corn-flecks. I might splurge on some broccoli every now and then or maybe even—wait for it—a bag of potatoes when they go on sale for a single Euro (like today!), but even that is an extravagance that I must be wary of.
If you haven’t put two and two together yet, let me make my point clear: I’m ridiculously, hopelessly, unequivocally broker than broke. And somehow, I’m making it work.
This all started a few weeks back when everyone else in my study abroad program began to travel abroad while abroad. Throngs of girls would stumble to Italian class hungover from the mere experience of having spent a weekend on the Amalfi coast, bathing in the sun and gallivanting with swarthy Italian boys. Through the haze of my contact high I could feel my jealousy and fear—“I walked around and read a book this weekend, what the hell is wrong with me? What if I never wander the streets of Paris? What if I never see the skies of Barcelona?”
I resolved not to become the spectre of international shut-innery that haunted my mind. I was going to travel my ass off, goddammit. Classes be damned. And so I whipped out my computer, my debit card, a new Google Maps tab, and began to craft my European tour economic downfall.
First there was Rome, and Pisa and Venice—places that I had to see. I turned my focus farther then to farther places like Paris. I took a breather when my plans began to rhyme (read it again) and decided that two trips “abroad abroad” would suffice and added a weekend in Ibiza to my literary just for shits and giggles. Everything fit into my schedule perfectly, I didn’t have to miss any classes, and would you believe it? I’d only managed to spend €250 to take care of all my traveling expenses for the entire semester. So clever, I was. So frugal, so prudent. So…wrong.
The thing about travelling? It never really goes the way you plan for it to. Busses run late, hostels cancel your bookings, the guy you’d agreed to stay with for a weekend turns out to be a pair of much older guys (plural) whose offer develops an insidious, lascivious undertone the moment you actually meet in person for the first time. Life comes at you quick when you’re travelling and money is there to cushion the impact of the inevitable blows. It’s difficult impossible to see these things coming, much less budget in for them. Surely enough, as the months slipped by I watched my bank account slowly wilt like a malnourished flower in blistering heat.
Between my planning out my traveling so far in advance and RyanAir’s nefarious “no-returns” policy, not travelling would have been a monumental waste of money and a decision had to be made. Travel—and live like a pauper, or stay in Florence and live like a slightly less impoverished pauper. I made the more romantic choice.
So here I sit, writing at half past nine. Wishing I’d watched my bottom line.
But now, I’ve splurged on snacks and wine; this pinot works well with Madelines.