I often joke that despite having lived in France for five months now, I'm still no good at speaking French. However, during our 10 day sojourn in Italy and Prague I was, in a strange way, reassured by how completely lost I felt without the ability to speak either Italian or Czech. The feeling of part horror and part amusement which overcame me when having disembarked an aeroplane somewhere vaguely near Rome I realised I had absolutely no idea how to explain to anyone around me that my flight from London had unbeknownst to me landed in an entirely different airport to the one all my fellow assistants had taken from Bordeaux made me realise just how much I underestimate my ability to communicate in French. I quickly realised that what in France would have been a quick and easy sentence was being hindered substantially by the fact that the only Italian I know is the vocabulary specific to pasta, cheese and ice-cream, and when trying to get from one side of a capital city to the other, mumbling "Um.. me losto? Cioccolato? Tagliatelle?" is frankly not going to get you any further than the car park of the arrivals gate. So it was that begrudgingly, a little too slowly and a little too loudly, I had to feel a tiny part of my soul shrivel away as I asked an airport official, 'Excuse me? Do you speak any English?' A sad day for language students all over the world who spend their leisurely hours explaining to their housemates who study 'real' subjects that its a disgraceful reminder of colonialism that the British think they can just march about the globe expecting everyone to speak their language. And I hadn't even got anywhere near the Czech Republic yet.
Nevertheless, it turns out that I'm not the first person to ask such a question in the arrivals gate of (one of two of - who knew?) Rome's airport. Having successfully over-annuciated my way to meeting up with my friends, we began what would be 10 of the most entertaining days of my life. We reenacted the Hunger Games in the Colosseum, tried our hand at paparazzi-ing in the midst of Milan fashion week, and pub crawled with the best of them in Prague. It was definitely eventful, but I think a lot of the stories are those sorts of anecdotes where you really have to be there. You just have to trust me when I say that I think I hurt from laughing almost every day, and that nothing has ever been funnier than watching the look of despair on the face of a girl who hates to climb stairs inadvertently find herself trapped in a crowd of rush hour commuters who hurried her onto a broken metro escalator, which just so happened to be one of the longest we came across, while we all glided smoothly up the adjacent (fully functional) one. There's no point in me relating every single tale, so have some pictures instead.
As one of the others cleverly pointed out on her blog, maybe one of the best things about this whole year is that despite the fact that we just went abroad for 10 days and then came back to start work, it still feels like we're all on holiday. Très agréable, if you ask me.
Until next time, par-dessous et dehors.
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