Padova!!!

My junior year of college, I studied abroad in Padova, Italy. Somehow (shame on me!) I have never been back in the 18 years since. How did all that time go by? It was a really amazing, emotional return for me. The whole city seems a little bit smaller than I remember, but even more beautiful. I mean, come on...

My friends and I used to joke that the guidebooks, which would bill Padova as a nice daytrip from Venice, had it wrong and it should be the other way around. But I do really think, especially after revisiting, that this city is majorly under-appreciated. (Lots of people in blue were out for a charity run one night as we strolled through town. There's not really a city uniform.)

It was crazy and overwhelming to find my favorite sandwich shop of nearly twenty years ago still there just where I remembered it and still serving the exact same sandwiches. That and dozens of other things jolted my memory or were pretty much as I had imagined/remembered them in the meantime.

And the food! Ahhh...

The second semester of the year that I studied in Padova, I had a language exchange partner, V, who was preparing to move to Boston for two years with her now-husband, P. So in addition to the time I spent with her/them in Padova, I also got to see them a bunch of times in Boston since they were living there when I was back there finishing my final year of college. We've only exchanged a handful of emails in the 15 years since we last saw each other, but V & P immediately invited me to stay with them when I let them know I was visiting, and it was so much fun to see them again...




...and to meet their kids. Their oldest was actually born the second year they lived in Boston, and I met him as a 4-month-old baby. Now he is about to turn 16 and has two younger siblings. (Middle child pictured here with P, as they clean the mushrooms they drove up across the border into Austria to collect that day.)



Even more mind-blowing than seeing V & P again was having dinner with the family that hosted me during my year in Padova. My kind host parents, C & M, are basically the same as I remember them. But their kids were just 3 and 5 years old when I lived in their home, and it was crazy to see them now as college students.

It was a totally overwhelming visit in all the best ways. That year in Italy really started the process of unlocking my imagination about what kind of life I wanted to lead and set the course for my adult existence of vagabonding. To revisit this place and those memories after all of this time...wow. It was worth the wait.