La Bella Vita: Life in Rome

Little did my 21 year old self know back in 2009 when I last wrote on this blog, but 4-5 years later, I would be living in Rome. Not exactly the star of Broadway or the silver screen that I had perhaps hoped, but hey, I'd say it's not too shabby of a life.

I came here in August 2013 and stayed through June 2014 as an au pair for a somewhat rich family with 2 boys: one 16-17 years old and the other 11-12 (they both had their birthdays within the first 4 months of me being with them). They went to American international schools and thus needed a live-in English tutor to help with their homework. The high school especially demanded a lot of the older boy. Neither parent could help much since the father only knew a few basic words of English and the mother's English was intermediate. The first month was an interesting adjustment period. After a week in Rome, we all traveled down to Calabria for 3 weeks vacation. Here is an excerpt from a diary entry I wrote at that time:

Welp…I made it to Italy. London was amazing to relive and I made a few friends in the brief time I was there. I loved Germany more than I expected. Christina and Bernd were amazing hosts and meeting with Julia and her boyfriend was fun. Germany is beautiful and green and straight out of a fairy tale. I wish I had more time to explore it. It’s weirdly matched with Italy, which has a much different look about it. While there is certainly green, there is something less fairy tale about it. It’s more tropical, like Florida or California. I’ve even seen some trees that at least resemble palm trees. The temperatures surely match the tropics. The family has a huge house that I walked into thinking “Geez, this is a mansion.” It was god awful hot my first week. I’m glad we came down to Calabria where the breeze and large body of water right across from us keeps it much cooler. That and maybe I’ve adjusted to no AC. Though it was weird spending the week in Rome where we each have our own room and bathroom and then coming down to a two bedroom apartment. Stefano and I were supposed to share a room, but he’s so accustomed to sleeping with his parents that he has only slept in the same room as me once, and that was because he fell asleep while we were watching Ted.
I’ve been in Italy 2 weeks now, Europe for 3 weeks. I don’t regret the decision to come here and it still feels right, but it has had its challenges. The biggest is the language barrier. I’m assuming it won’t be as bad up in Rome, but in Calabria, it is rare to find an English speaker. I did get lucky and made a friend online with a woman named Laura. She lives down here teaching ESL and helping people gain their dual citizenship. It turns out that she spent a good chunk of her childhood in Milford and Danbury. A small world indeed. She’s been my saving grace down here because the two times I’ve seen her so far have allowed me to speak fluent English with someone who isn’t a minor and to spend time outside the family. I hit the language wall Catherine spoke of sooner than I thought I would, wherein you don’t want to hear another word of that foreign language. But then a day or two after I hit it, I met up with Laura for the first time and was able to get English off my chest. It was great.

I’ve been dealing with a cold for the past week. If I was at home, it would have probably taken a different path. I would have started with decongestants and pain killers and later used cough medicine. However, I don’t have any of those here with me. The dad offered to get me an antibiotic, like he did for 16yr old who caught it a day or two after me, but I refused. I’ve pretty convinced it’s a virus and I’ve been raised to only use antibiotics when needed. Plus there’s also the potential yeast infection consequence I just don’t want to deal with. But now that it’s been a full week, I’m starting to worry.

I think I eventually gave into the antibiotics.
Calabria was amazing. It was wonderful to be living across from the beach. Even when the son and I were working on papers, we could still spare an hour or two to go down to the beach. We usually stopped work around 9 or so in order to go out with his friends (whose ages ranged from 14-28), go to a dinner, or whatever else we wanted. I was even allowed off the hook early once to go to a concert with Laura called Tarantella Power! Although I struggled with not knowing the language and now being smack-dab in the middle of a very loud family, I felt like I had made the correct decision coming to live with them.

When we came back to Rome, I started my Italian classes. My high school Spanish helped me a little but I spent most of my lessons highly confusing. I bonded with the girls in my glasses-two Germans and a Chilean. They all spoke English and helped me to understand what was going on. I was only with them for 2 weeks. The nature of my school was that people came and went and classes consistently changed. This was a double edged sword. I would make many friends but then lose them just as quickly over the next several months. Some, however, I kept in contact with and have stayed close with. Others I visited in their home countries. In December, I traveled to 4 countries in 2 weeks. I visited one friend in Barcelona, another for Christmas in Germany, met up with 2 in Prague, and unexpectedly saw another in Stockholm. Later, for Easter, I would stay with another in Berlin.

My first few months were difficult. There was more work than I ever expected there to be. As the 12 year old became more comfortable with me, he got more and more disrespectful. His parents did nothing to curb that. I had to field inappropriate questions, temper tantrums, and a terribly short attention span. The 17 year old is to this day an intelligent sweetheart, but his tendency for anxiety and perfectionism led to projects taking much longer than they should have. My hours were insanely unfair for an au pair. Sure, I had mornings off, but I started work with the younger one at 5:30pm then immediately switched to the older one with only a break for dinner. I had to impose a midnight cut-off so I could get some resemblance of sleep before my Italian class in the morning. My only day off was Friday. I worked weekends. One Friday night while out drinking wine with an Italian and a German friend, taking in a view of Rome, I remarked that I hadn't fallen in love with the city like everyone else seemed to. The Italian looked at me and said, "Well, of course not! You can only ever go out on Fridays! You haven't actually experienced Rome."

In January and February, the work for the older boy let up slightly. There were a few Saturday nights I was actually allowed to leave the house. I also began escaping on Monday nights to go to a language exchange where I met some of my best European friends. I even got my first full Saturday day off (the boys were both on school trips) and used it to go to the place I had been wanting to go to since middle school: Pompeii. I was able to convince a new friend I had made at the language exchange to come along. To this day, he is one of my best friends.

The spring not only brought beautiful weather, it brought what I had been yearning for in Rome: a steady-ish friend group. Friends who loved to all go out together and weren't always leaving in a weeks time. I was also able to open up my heart a bit more: something I had closed off a bit since breaking off my last relationship. No great story book romance came out of it, but I like to think some personal growth did. I learned that loving someone doesn't always mean you have to be with that person. But that's a subject for some other blog.

The summer came and my parents came to visit. Then I returned home to the US for 3 months. I knew I wasn't done with Rome. I wanted to go back and live there on my own. Not as a guest in someone else's house, under their rules, living with a family as a mid-twenty-something. So when September rolled around, I used my friend's wedding in London as a good marker/excuse to cross the pond once again. I then immediately returned to Rome. I found a flat in the center and although was very worried at first, managed to get a roommate who I meshed perfectly with. A roommate who became a friend.

Back in December 2012 when I was working as a library assistant and freshly out of a relationship, feeling the tremendous gut urge that my place was to be in Europe again, if you had told me Rome would have ended up being my city, I probably would have raised an eyebrow. I wanted to be in Europe, that was certain, but I had only been to northern Europe at that point. I was hoping for the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands maybe. Sure, Italy was a country I would have liked to visit, but live in? It wasn't until the job--an English tutor rather than a babysitter--that seemed to fit my skills presented itself that I finally considered it. I remember walking downstairs to the kitchen one morning and telling my mother, "So, I might go live in Italy." I'm pretty sure her and anyone else I talked to about going to live in Europe thought I was just talking pipe dreams, and at first I was afraid I was doing the same. But my gut kept me on the European path, and now here I am: living in the center of Rome, having friends from all around the world, teaching English, studying Italian, holding conversations in my second language, learning to cook both family recipes, Italian recipes, and new recipes.

And since this blog was first made to talk about my acting journey, let's talk about that:
In September, while still in the US, a friend called me up. She was working as the makeup artist on a film being shot in RI. The movie needed some plus sized actresses to be in a particular scene of the movie but was having trouble finding girls willing to do it. Truthfully, the premise of the scene is a hard one to sell. Based on real events, there is a frat party where the pledges have to bring plus sized dates to the "Cattle Call" where the girls get weighed and then the guys hook up with them. My feminist/plus size girl pride bells went off. I turned it down at first. Then they decided to offer SAG cards for the roles and said no one had to do anything they were uncomfortable with. I decided to go check it out. The environment and director put me at ease. All of the girls there were beautiful and confident. The director told us, "If these scenes come off as showing the girls as victims, we've failed." He explained that he saw the girls as equally exploiting the guys. They knew what the party was and that these were just dumb frat boys but wanted to hook up with some hot guys. Girls embracing their own sexuality. And in the end, my character ended up flirting with a very attractive frat boy who equally flirted back and SHE was the one to deliver the line suggesting they hook up. I'm not sure if that line will make it into the film, but I'm proud of how the issue was dealt with. At the end of the day, I got another thing for my resume, a few friends, and became SAG-Eligible. ;)

Here in Rome I have been making connections in the industry. I also got cast in a small independent film in which I have a few small scenes. I've been putting out my feelers to make other connections with casting directors and theatre companies. I even went on an audition for a student film in Italian. However, the script wasn't just in Italian, it was in dialect (a fact I hadn't been made aware of), so it was no surprise when I wasn't cast. Either way, it was a great experience. I'm thinking about trying to find an Italian monologue book so I can memorize things in Italian. I think acting in Italian would help improve my Italian. I'm at to the point where I understand 70% of what I hear, but speaking is a struggle.
I also saw a play in Italian the other night that a friend of mine co-wrote and acted in. I understood almost everything! It was a proud moment.

Well, this is a pretty long update. I hope to utilize this blog again in the future for my random musings, but we all know how good I am at keeping up with that. ;P