Every time I find myself in a new city, I think of the scene in l’Auberge Espagnol when the protagonist first arrives in Barcelona and says something about how strange it is to think that in a few months the streets will all be familiar, that he will pass the same places and same people hundreds of times, and that this foreign city will somehow become a home, even if for only for a few months. I arrived in Milano and shortly thereafter was overcome by a paralyzing sense of doubt about why I had actually come. There are several reasons that I am in Milano.

First and foremost, I’ve got this pesky honors capstone project that I’ve opted to fufil as ethnographic research with immigrants in Milano.

Next, of course, is the plain fact that I basically graduated and I’m not sure exactly what I want to do next. A fellowship I was applying for fell thru and grad school just doesn’t seem like ‘the next big thing’ anyway..,I know I want to start working, but the terrific palette of options available in DC makes me feel lost and undecided. I’m here because I’d rather jump full-heartedly into something I want later this summer than drag my feet into something I’m ambivalent about now.

And dancing, as always, in the background is a third reason I am here: to become more myself. If the twenties are a time of self-discovery, self-improvement, and goal-setting then something deep inside me tells me that I’m going to need to spend the first bit of my twenties wandering and somewhat lost. Which is just about all I’ve done so far in Milano, except there’s one amazing thing about this city – I can’t manage to get lost…sure, I manage to walk in circles, but I seem to wind up exactly where I need to be at the end of it. Wandering, however, definitely describes what I’m doing best: I don’t seem to have anything other than a vague objective in mind when I set off with my dinky map and my dozen or so well-rehearsed Italian phrases. Nevertheless I managed to find an apartment already. My ability to find an apartment so quickly was courtesy of the beautiful Spanish girl that shares a room with me at the hostel. Her name is Laura (pronounced Loawra) and she is taking an intensive course in fashion design. She has patterns for clothes and all her little fashion-design-tools scattered across the room, wears really funky clothing that she made herself, and speaks in a thick Spanish accent. I like it.

The apartment I will be living in is in an area of town called Ortica and I take a fabulous convenient, rickety old trolley car to get there. I share the apartment with two Italian women from Siciliy – Valeria e Maria. They are 30something and work in Milano. Valeria, dressed in a stripped mini-dress with sparkly tights and chunky boots when I met her, is a blonde-ish young woman who works in a hotel and dreams of traveling. Maria – very typically Sicilian in her beauty, darker with a salient nose – speaks with harshly rolled R's and is desperately in love with a man from Ecuador.

Other general observations: The city is old and dirty and I like it. There’s a slight lack of benches and I think it’s entirely unjustifiable to pay for public toilets, but the food is delicious and italiano is coming very easily. Also, I’ve already confirmed the stereotype that Italian men are endlessly romantic shitheads: They walk down the street with a beautiful girlfriend on their arm and yet their whole head turns as another beautiful woman walks by.

Nevertheless, I am tucked at a table in the corner of a little room on Viale Tunsia with no clue how all of this is going to work out, but secure and comfortable about it anway. As my twenty-second birthday approaches in the next week something about my current life just feels ‘right’.