Walking and coffee...but not at the same time and actually it's a chai latte.

I am now sitting in one of my favorite cafes downtown, sipping an iced dairy beverage in a glass while avoiding doing work for my thesis. And I feel pretty good about myself.

Why, you ask? Because, well, I walked here. Yes, I resisted the very strong urge to get into my car and I walked. This is no small undertaking, being that I reside in suburbia and it takes 45 minutes to get here on foot. But actually, it wasn't so bad. This is partly because I am now used to walking great distances* after spending six and a half months living in Florence, Italy, where it took me 40 minutes to get from my house in Le Cure to the Duomo.

My willingness to take the slower route is one of the biggest changes I see in myself post-Firenze. Not saying I've completely turned over a new leaf, but before I was a hyper-efficient, talk-on-the-phone-while-driving-and-sipping-coffee-out-of-a-to-go-cup type. Okay, actually the to-go cups always made me feel guilty and I can't handle caffeine, and now you have to have one of those headset things to talk on the phone in the car and that's just too complicated for me. But anyway.

The point is, before I never walked downtown. Somehow I always thought of a reason to drive, in hindsight likely because I couldn't justify "wasting" 40 minutes walking. But in Florence, I became a proponent of what I like to call "The Public Transportation Mentality." In less capitalized terms, I mean when you're taking a bus or walking everywhere, you're forced to give up control. For example, sometimes you are walking to the bus stop to catch the bus to work and you see it pull up to the stop from a block away. Or, even though Florentine bus drivers are speedy in sometimes frightening ways, once you are on the bus you get there when you get there. I'm sure it helped that my bosses at work didn't really care what time I got there, and neither did my bookbinding teacher. In any case, public transportation forced me to calm down and breathe a little.

As I neared downtown this morning, breathing slightly heavily (too much gelato!), I saw two people toting disposible coffee cups. One thing about Florence is that to-go cups do not exist there. People drink their coffee at the bar, standing up, in ceramic or glass. They drink it fast (I mean, an espresso is tiny after all), but slowly, too. They are not sucking it down while yacking on the phone while hurrying to their next destination. They take a moment to enjoy that coffee and maybe chat with the bartender. And it wasn't an infrequent occurence that a friend of mine would arrive at work on the same bus that I did (ie, two buses after I'd intended to get there) and stop for a coffee before heading up the hill.

Maybe I'm able to say this because it's summer, I don't have a job, and I don't actually have anything to do but work on my thesis. I guess I'll have to see how it goes once I get back to the "real" world...but I hope I can continue with The Public Transportation Mentality and my fondness for ceramic drinking vessels. Both seem healthier in a lot of ways (and also more fun).



*relative term. We can talk about how I never go hiking later.