Thanks Mom!

SO as you may know (or maybe not), moms love to worry. Worry just about everything. My mom has been so chill about this trip it’s awesome. I’ve g-chatted with her a few times, emailed her almost daily, which is funny cause even though she knows I’ll email her everyday, she hasn’t been checking (or at least not responding) everyday. This comforts me because I love that she’s not on edge, and that she’s chilling at home/work. One thing, however, that my mom likes to freak out about is… packing. She is fixed on the fact that if you take all the essentials and right tools with you, traveling can be blissful and if lacking, dreadful. As you man know (or not) from my first blog, I went through a pretty extensive process to make sure I was taking the essentials to comfortably get me through this trip. (Some of the more difficult finds were: a small side shoulder bag, converters for 7 countries, and a dual voltage hair straightener). But, come on, no matter how much you plan, you’re always going to forget something!

Case 1: I thought I had everything, but as we all know, moms are always right (I don’t know how) and we still manage to forget things. For example, I hardly shave. Hair does not grow well on my body (thank god!). Stupidly, I still should have shaved before coming to Europe because then I wouldn’t have had to again until I came home. Of course I wore a skirt in London and realized holy crap, I need to shave and I do not have a razor. Then I was like ok, maybe I packed one? Just maybe? I opened my toiletry bag to see that I hadn’t, but found a Zip-Loc bag and miraculously in the bag were Q-tips, cotton balls, antiseptic, Vaseline (not sure why), band-aids, and you guessed it, a razor. Thanks mom! I happily shaved and accidently forgot my razor in the shower. But who cares! I have shiny smooth legs and bare armpits to last me till end of July!

Case 2: I am still on a train. This time I’m going from Milan to Venice. I had more funny moments with the sweet, old Italian lady I met on the train from Lucerne. We were still going on the train and just passed Switzerland into Italy, and into a town named Como. It was BEAUTIFUL. She looked at me and said, “George Clooney?” and I said yes and she explained that he has a HUGE villa right here in Como and told me to look for it. I was so distracted by the hundreds of colorful homes circling the gorgeous, turquoise lake that I didn’t look for his house and she said she didn’t see it either. But she said it was grand! Then she took off her glasses to clean them and said, “haha look, made in America at grand store Costco! How funny, made in America!” I took my Fendi glasses off and said, “look made in Italia” and for some reason we all found this hilarious; she was so cute! When we left to switch trains she grabbed my arm and patted me on the back, and held my hand and said ciao like 10 times! I love sweet people who don’t who don’t let language barriers stop them from having a good time on a long ass train ride. I need to do that more often. OK I SIDE TRACKED. Back to the case, I get on the train to Venice and grab a huge, comfy seat. Me and William were able to get off the other train, buy our ticket and run to get on our last train to Venice in all of 10 minutes with 5 minutes ‘til departure! Go us! We’re chilling until some Italian guy tells us we are in first class and that those seats are reserved. We, along with a few others, reluctantly get up, only to have our seats replaced by 8 year olds. WTF. We walk out in the the large luggage department and see people waiting and realize we don’t have a seat. I see the FILTHY floor and have to decide: should I just brave it? should I kill my legs for the next two hours? NEITHER! I decide to look at my outer pocket, knowing that my mom always keep plastic Target bags in there for dirty clothes, shoes, etc. But I find something better, a large brown bag material. Then, I remember my mom saying, “Here I’m folding this brown bag paper in there just in case you need to pack some delicate stuff when you come home. This is way better than putting one of those “FRAGILE” stickers on there, cause then they just throw it harder.” Thanks MOM! I don’t have delicates, but I do have a clean bottom. I laid this out on the floor and sat comfortably in the den with sweet A.C. Finally, when the first stop was announced, I got up and went to coach and the second people stood up and grabbed us some seats!

I’m sure I’m going to have other “thanks mom!” moments, but I decided I’d give some credit to my mother before I forget.