Lori Duff Writes

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

I recently returned from a two-week trip to Parts Abroad. I didn’t really announce that I was going ahead of time, nor did I post contemporaneous pictures, because I am a former prosecutor married to a retired cop, and we are professionally afraid of bad guys who know we’ll be out of town.

But we’re back now, and boy do I have stories to tell.

I don’t do a lot of recreational travel. I do a lot of travelling, but not much of it is simply for fun. Most of my going places involves business trips, conferences, retreats, and visiting family. It’s rare that I take a vacation vacation. But when my husband and I hit our twenty-fifth anniversary, we decided it was time to start checking things off our bucket list. We managed to organize it in time for six months after our twenty-sixth anniversary.

With the help of my good friend Michelle West of MeWe Travel, we decided to splurge. We booked an eleven-day cruise on the Regent Seven Seas Splendour in a concierge suite starting in Venice and ending in Rome. We spent two nights in Venice before the cruise, and one night in Rome afterwards.

In between, I ate my weight in prosciutto.

I’ve always loved Italian food. My goal was to eat my way across and around Italy. I met my goal. And then some.

In addition to eating, we saw amazing things and learned a lot, both culturally and about life in general. I learned a lot about myself. For example, I learned that I would be fantastic at being a part of the idle rich. I have a real talent for it.

First and foremost, Americans are super obvious at being Americans. I spent the two years leading up to this trip trying to learn Italian via Duolingo. Granted, I don’t know how proficient I ever got, but I was capable of handling basic business transactions and ordering food and whatnot. Still, no one let me. I reeked of America. No one even humored me. Even if I tried speaking Italian to a store clerk, they answered me back in English. “This is going to take forever and be really painful if we don’t just do this in English,” they seemed to say. “I don’t have a spare five minutes for you to remember the word for spoon.”[1]

Everyone there spoke at least some English: even the sixteen-year-old store clerks spoke better English than I spoke Italian. They didn’t just speak English. I’d hear many of them switch effortlessly between Italian and English and Spanish and French and Arabic. All the road signs were in multiple languages. I thought about how pissy Americans get when things are reprinted in Spanish, or when you have to “oprima dos por Espanol” and it made me wonder why we are so against multi-linguilism.  It seems handy to me. I remember being six and watching the 1976 Olympics with my Great-Grandmother, who was a Romanian immigrant. She could tell me what Nadia Comaneci and her coach were saying to each other in Romanian and I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen—it was like a super power. I vowed then to learn another language and then had to wait years for someone to teach me rudimentary Spanish because I lived in America and no one thought it was important.

I didn’t speak much Italian on the trip, but learning it was useful. I was able to read signs and menus, and understand what people around me were saying. I didn’t feel as lost as I did when we were in, say, Croatia, and I didn’t even know how to say hello or thank you.

More on that later. [This will be a several part series….]

[1] Cucchiaio

Buy my book, Devil’s Defense, or the audiobook, and/or find me on Substack.

Lori Duff

Lori B. Duff is an award-winning author who practices law on the side.  Her latest book, “If You Did What I Asked in the First Place” was awarded the Gold Medal for humor in the Foreword INDIES awards in 2019. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook. For more blogs written by Lori, click here. For more information about Lori in general, click here. If you want Lori to do your writing for you, click here. If you want Lori to help you market your book, click here.