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Three stories of life-changing travel: Israel, Honduras and Rome

A single trip has the power to change your perspective - or even your life - for good.

Published: 26 September 2019 04:00 CEST
Updated: 17 March 2021 11:48 CET

Three stories of life-changing travel: Israel, Honduras and Rome

Photo credits: Dan Gold, Angello Lopez on Unsplash and Liv at The Local

The Local and Lufthansa have partnered to bring you three stories of life-changing travel. We asked members of our Facebook group for European travel fans to tell us about the trips that transformed them. Presenting three of their most inspirational travel tales.

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Joyce Oladeinde’s Israeli Shabbat Dinner

One of the highlights of my trip to Israel a few years back – a memory that will stay with me forever – was when Dov, a kind Jewish local, invited me into his own home for a traditional Shabbat dinner with his family. Shabbat is a day of rest that begins on Friday at sunset and ends the following evening. At dinner, the tables were set with fine tableware, candles lit up the dining room, and Dov’s family interspersed the engaged conversations with traditional Hebrew songs. What affected me most about this experience of Shabbat, however, was all the thought that had gone into it – and how seriously Dov and his family took this day of rest. During the Shabbat, the use of electricity and electrical appliances was prohibited, and everyone in the family had their phones switched off. The dinner, too, had been prepared without any use of electricity. For me, this encounter became a wakeup call of sorts about the importance of rest in an age where electronic devices and social media easily consume time we could otherwise spend with our families. After meeting Dov, I often remind myself that it is okay to unplug to be more present with loved ones – or at least be available for the kindness of strangers.

Photo credits: Joyce Oladeinde (DIYwithJoy.com)

Katie Osthoff’s Volunteer Vacation in Honduras

Last year, I went to Honduras and spent time on the Island of Roatan, where I volunteered for Sol Roatan, a wonderful foundation working with community-based programs to promote the quality of education and life in less developed areas of the island. I was fortunate enough to be there when Santa Claus was visiting, bringing the crowd of ecstatic children gifts. I cooked and served hot dogs while other volunteers played hula hoop, did face paintings, and tried to orchestrate a line for the kids to meet Santa. The joy on their faces upon meeting and greeting us, playing with us, and sharing with us their interests and hobbies was something out of the ordinary for me. The hard work this organization does to give these children equal experiences and educational opportunities to those living in more privileged environments made a lasting impact on me. It also changed feelings about the future of this planet, and made me realize how important it is to foster child and adolescent development in order to secure a happy and healthy world for future generations. I was also moved by the beauty surrounding the school, the crystalline water and the dolphins playing on the horizon, and this made me think about the importance of appreciating the simple things in life, too. To this day, I keep up with Sol Roatan on social media and think about them often.

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A post shared by SOL International Foundation (@solroatan) on Dec 19, 2018 at 6:49pm PST

Mesmerized in Rome with Eloise Aurora Alisier

When I first came to Rome, I realized for the first time how being in a particular place can boost up your mood for days, and also breathe new life into your everyday perceptions. A native of coastal northern Italy, I grew up contemplating the vivid colors of the sky, and I used to walk by the sea almost every day, and must’ve known its every color and shade and hue. But during my first time in Rome, I found that there was a soulfulness to the place, an energy I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but that seemed to be everywhere I went. In some strange way, the sea was no longer just the sea during the duration of my stay, and the sky wasn’t just the sky, and the colors all around me were brighter and more intense, more luminous, more striking, and more deeply affecting than anything I had experienced before. I walked around the city for days, mostly by myself, kilometer after kilometer, hour after hour without getting tired one bit. By the end of the trip, it felt as though I had been walking for months, mesmerized by all that beauty.

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Photo: Eloise Aurora Alisier

This content was produced by The Local Creative Studio and sponsored by Lufthansa.

Life in Rome can take a while to get used to. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

If you’d told me four years ago that I’d be coming to Rome’s defence, I would have told you: Ma va’. Yeah right, get out of town. And I would have said I’d be long gone myself.

And yet, as the latest InterNations survey of expats around the world puts Rome in last place for city life and work, here I am not only still living here but saying out loud: this place isn’t so bad.

It’s not that I don’t get where my unhappy fellow foreigners are coming from. I never dreamed of Rome before I moved here and found it far from dreamy once I arrived, in summer 2017. I’d grown up a short flight away (the UK) and lived in European capitals (Paris, Berlin) for several years, and after a stint further afield (Japan), I naively thought that moving to Rome would feel like coming home.

Instead I found myself complaining to anyone who would listen about the same things that InterNations’ respondents listed as Rome’s downsides. The unreliable public transport. The scant public services. The politicians on the take. The provincialism. The rubbish – good grief, the rubbish. The inequality and lack of opportunities for young people – and lack of young people themselves, as it seemed in certain neighbourhoods.

Sure, I liked the food and I couldn’t argue with the weather, but it felt frivolous to enjoy the small pleasures amid what I began to see as existential flaws. They spiralled for me into the impression of a city on the brink: the trash is piled shoulder-high because people here don’t care about anyone else, I told myself.

The fact everyone assumes I’m a tourist means they’re not used to anyone who doesn’t look or sound like them. I’m struggling to meet other young professionals – it must be a sign that the best and the brightest have all left. Because really, who’d choose to live here?

Photo: Andreas SOLARO/AFP

Partly it was because I didn’t feel I had chosen to live here. I had moved for my American partner’s teaching job, and nothing was more alienating than encountering people who were stubbornly, unaccountably, in love with the place – or an idea of it. An awkward pause would ensue as I contemplated whether to mumble something innocuous about gelato or take it upon myself to debunk their romantic notions and expose what I was convinced was the ‘real’ Rome – dirty, dysfunctional, doomed.

It wasn’t all in my head. As the InterNations survey has shown for several years straight, many foreign transplants report deep dissatisfaction with the city. So do Romans as a whole: one survey in 2020 found that most residents said their quality of life had worsened in the past five years. Global studies have named Rome one of the unhealthiest cities in Europe, and its roads some of the most dangerous. When Italians compile the list of the ‘best places to live in Italy’, there’s a reason why Rome never comes close to the top ten.

In fact, every time I lamented the city’s decline, I fitted in better than I realised: no one complains more about Rome than Romans themselves.

Photo: Alberto PIZZOLI/AFP

There was perverse comfort to be had in realising that people born and raised here saw the same things I did and found them just as galling. La grande monnezza, they call it: forget ‘the great beauty’ (la grande bellezza), it’s the great rubbish dump. Roma fa schifo, as a popular local blog has it. Rome is disgusting.

Huh, I began to think I scrolled through photos of egregiously parked cars or smirked at another meme about the incompetents in city hall, maybe we can get on after all. It was a glimpse of a dark, deeply cynical humour that was one of the first things about Rome I had to admit I liked.

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Gradually, other qualities forced their way into view. I moved from a stuffy neighbourhood in the west of the historic centre to outside the city walls in the east and discovered that yes, other people under 50 do live here, no, not every foreigner is a tourist or study-abroad student, and thank goodness, not every restaurant serves only Italian food. Our new apartment was bigger, and bigger by far than anything our relatively modest incomes would have got us in the capitals of our home countries.

In fact, I suspected I wasn’t living in a capital city at all. Milan is where most of the money and opportunities within Italy are to be found, which has long made it a more logical place to move to for Italians and foreigners alike. I envy Milan’s metamorphosing skyline and cosmopolitan population – things I associate with ‘real’ cities.

But what do you know: if Rome comes 57th in the InterNations survey, Milan comes 56th. The responses suggest that housing is more expensive and harder to find up there, and the cost of living higher.

I’ll leave it to people who live there to say what it’s really like, but I wonder if there are other trade-offs: I’d take the people-watching and window-shopping in Milan over Rome any day, but would I have to wear the ‘right’ clothes to fit in? I might have more chances to get ahead, but would I be judged on my job title or salary, and would people be more competitive? For better or worse, these aren’t things I have to worry about in Rome.

OPINION: Why Milan is a much better city to live in than Rome

Lucky for me I can afford not to: I’m not one of the 41 percent of foreign residents in Rome who told InterNations their disposable household income is not enough to cover expenses. Salaries are low here, and the cost of living – not visiting – can be higher than you might think. I’m in the privileged position of working for international employers, who pay better than local ones, and of splitting the bills with someone else in the same boat. We’re comfortable, but Rome isn’t the place to make your fortune.

So it’s no economic powerhouse. But culturally it’s got more life than I first gave it credit for. The things I’d assumed were missing altogether – new music, interesting events, a mix of people and backgrounds – were all there, they were just on a smaller scale and correspondingly harder to find. (Places to start looking: mailing lists, venues’ Facebook or Instagram pages, Zero.)

Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

In other cities I felt I’d made inroads by the end of the first year; in Rome, I was still at least another year away from meeting the friends who’d become my group here and, in turn, introduce me to people and places I wouldn’t have found on my own.

More than other cities, people say that Rome – the Rome that’s not in guidebooks, at least – is da scoprire, ‘to discover’ or even ‘unearth’. While you’re digging, having an ‘in’ can make all the difference.

In some ways, Covid-19 also helped to rehabilitate Rome for me. The seriousness with which most people took the pandemic, and the camaraderie my neighbours showed throughout that first bewildering lockdown, proved that Romans were more than capable of caring for strangers. The months that followed, when we were confined to city or regional limits, taught me to appreciate the possibilities I might otherwise have ignored: travel might be impossible, but at least I had woods, lakes, mountains, waterfalls and the Mediterranean on my doorstep.

Other things I had to work around, or simply live with. I’m as convinced now as I was four years ago that Rome’s public transport system is woefully inadequate, but now I mainly avoid it: I walk or cycle as much as I can. In fact a whole alternative network of shared transport has sprung up in the time I’ve been here, from e-bikes to car shares and scooters, or monopattini.

Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

I’m yet to see a fix for the city’s rubbish problem, but I no longer assume it’s all the residents’ fault. It’s the result of decades of misuse of public funds, graft and organized crime – hardly reassuring, but marginally less bleak than thinking that none of your neighbours give a damn.

Because always, of course, there are people trying to improve things – by protesting, by voting, by picking up litter, even by filling in potholes on the sly. (Remember that if you’re a citizen of another EU country living in Rome, you have the right to vote in city elections too.) Doing the work yourself doesn’t absolve the authorities of the responsibility to do it, but in the meantime, as one acquaintance put it, at least your sidewalk is clean.

And those small pleasures: I finally gave myself permission to enjoy them. I like cracker-thin Roman pizza, supposedly kept from rising by the city’s hard water. I like sun that dries my laundry even in December. I like the view of mountains on a clear day. I like the light that glows golden around half an hour before sunset and works a kind of magic on ochre walls and brick bell towers and crumbling aqueducts.

In my fifth year here, I know now that these things don’t blind me to Rome’s faults, nor do I have to pretend not to see them to prove I’m not just another tourist. I live here; sometimes it’s bad; and most days, at about 5pm, looking over the rooftops, it’s good.

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