About a month into being a waitress, I decided that I needed to do something else with my life. Every few weeks or so I would have a break down on my nightly walk home, triggered by something as small as a rude customer, or worse, a nice customer that didn’t tip. I would just tell myself over and over again “This is not my life, this is just my Summer,” and I needed to find a way to make that true.
It just so happened that my sister is in Goldsmiths School in Florence, Italy. Though the two of us never got along, when she came to surprise me for my college graduation Zoe told me I could come and stay with her whenever I liked. So I saved, and saved some more, and saved until my bank account was just shy of 5 digits. A great feeling. Actually, the best feeling.
By the end of September, I had been out of my summer sublet for a month and couch surfing across town, hosted by my incredibly gracious friends. Like I said, I was saving. The motto was: “I could spend this money in Europe.” And so I did.
The plan was to stay in Florence for 3 weeks, then head over to Croatia. This did not happen. In fact, nothing happened the way I planned it. I had signed up for a 2 week cooking course at a private cooking school, and fell so in love with the class that I stayed for a whole month.
We made everything in that class. Pasta, branzino with artichokes, minestrone, stuffed pasta, rabbit with blackberry, cuttlefish, colored pasta, 7 different types of gnocchi, boar, and did I mention pasta?
No Real Job 