Carey on wandering: Florence
This photo and some Chardonnay-soaked postcards are just about all I have from my trip to Florence.
It really is a beautiful city, a “city wide shrine to the Renaissance” but the truth of the matter is, I saw little more than this rooftop during my couple of days there.
I spent almost every waking minute that I had in Florence on that seat, taking in the Tuscan sun and who would blame me? I had been travelling for about a week almost non-stop. I was exhausted and stressed and this rooftop was as close to the garden of Eden that the Northern Hemisphere has to offer. Even now as I look at this picture, I feel like I’ve walked into a postcard.
But what is a postcard really? It’s just a flimsy piece of paper with colourful letters and a standard stock pic usually of an overcrowded tourist destination which will already be at the bottom of someone’s bin by the time you get home?
What does a postcard tell you about a place?
In reality, very little.
I might have spent the majority of my time in Florence on this rooftop and failed to tick off the majority of my bucket list. I didn’t see the Ponte Vecchio or the Boboli Gardens. I had been desperate to go to the Medici Palace and the Leonardo DaVinci Museum. The closest I got to the statue of David was the queue outside where I stood crying at an ATM as I took out money to pay the equally stone-faced Italian Transport officer beside me.
I had spent weeks planning Florence, almost down to the minute but I forgot to take one crucial thing into account- life. We had been travelling constantly with rucksacks almost as big as us. I felt like a snail, carrying the weight of our entire belongings on our backs as we edged slowly but surely around Florence’s ancient streets. Our feet were blistered and sore from a week of rushing between crowded cathedrals to more mobbed monuments. It was 30 something degree heat and we were Scottish. It’s heat I have only experienced a handful of times in my life and at least then I had a blow-up paddling pool to hide out in. Not to mention the once insignificant issue that neither of us actually spoke Italian.
Not being able to speak Italian in Rome is one thing. Frankly, it didn’t even register as a problem. And even though Florence is chock full of tourists, especially in the height of July, it was by no means plain sailing. I pride myself in not being another arrogant British tourist in a foreign country without a vague inclination to even try to speak the language. I studied languages at university, I wasn’t very good but the passion was there. But what use would my admittedly limited knowledge of French and Spanish be in this Italian city?
Funnily enough, the Spanish did come in handy when we first arrived at our AirBnB. Our host was out of town and she had left the number of her Spanish housekeeper. We had arrived ten minutes later from our agreed upon time, despite having to walk following our dramatic altercation with Italian transport already that morning. Yet, she was nowhere to be seen. We collapsed onto the ground that by midday was now cooking under our feet and we waited. I called the housekeeper, leaving her messages in broken Spanish until she eventually arrived and let us in the apartment.
But Spanish didn’t help me much when we being fined for failing to validate our tram ticket. Or when we realised that our European adapters didn’t work in Florence and I needed to find a three-pronged one for our painfully dying phones aka as our only lifelines.
Florence was where it actually hit me: how vulnerable I was as a 20-year-old woman walking around a city that I didn’t know, surrounded by voices speaking a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t have a phone to help me navigate my way through the similar looking streets or to use to contact anyone if I needed help. When my ex suggested that I go out by myself because he was struggling with the heat and the side effects of backpacking, I immediately batted away the idea. I remember saying I didn’t want to leave him alone, I’d feel bad and what if he needed something or the AirBnB host turned up-it was me that had all the details.
I knew then that was an excuse, I’m sure he did too. I had no issue with leaving him necessarily. I had worked unbelievably hard to get there and I wanted to absorb every single second of it. I had spent months dreaming about it. It was important to me. But when I got there, I froze. I have always wondered since was it just because I was scared? Did I miss out on this beautiful city because I held myself back? My uncle a couple of decades before went travelling across Europe all by himself. He had a journal just like I did. Yet with none of the luxuries of pre-booked accommodations or the safety net of Google Maps.
Is that the curse of Gen Z? We’ve substituted our guide books for travel vlogs, language phrasebooks for Google Translate. All neatly condensed into one nifty hand-held device that’s value expires as soon its battery dries up. And you’re left staring at a glorified lifeless brick with no real point to it at all except for anger management purposes.
I definitely have a point if I do say so myself. I do rely on technology and I often hide behind my research and plans. If I was faced with the choice of taking the trip or planning it, I’m Team Plan every time. But that can’t just be a generational thing.
With the news of Sarah Everard’s death this week sending shock waves across social media, the reality that women have to face in the streets they know proves why I wasn’t willing to risk going out by myself in streets that I didn’t. The conversations about sexual harassment are something that I’ve touched on extensively in my other posts and is not something I want to focus on in the more light-hearted section of my blog. That being said, I had to mention it.
Since, as a young woman, not travelling alone is something that is drilled into us as soon as we start walking and talking by ourselves. Girls go to the bathroom together. We don’t walk by ourselves at night. We take the long well lit way back and let our loved ones know that we’re home safe. The same goes for travelling abroad.
As women, we have grown up with the horror stories, we can almost recite them by heart, even if we do our best to ignore them. The amount of articles out there for women wanting to travel alone that give out advice about where is “safest” to go and tips for protecting yourself. They make recommendations on everything from booking private accommodation and not telling anyone where you are staying to practical advice about how to respond to strangers abroad if they are making you feel uncomfortable and linking up with other solo women travellers.
I can’t help but wonder if most men don’t think twice about decisions like this.
Since my trip to Florence, I have labelled myself as not brave enough to do it alone. I’ve told myself that I’m too sheltered, too inexperienced to do that kind of thing and too much of a home girl to venture too far on my own.
I refuse to take responsibility for that now. It is not my fault that I am scared about something that has been lectured into me since birth. Why do I blame myself for having doubts about travelling alone when everyday society has scolded the women that have been brave enough to travel by themselves despite the risks? Why would I not question it for a second when our first reaction when a man has hurt or killed them, is that it is their fault because “they put themselves in that situation in the first place”.
I wish I could say that I could get on a plane right now and go travelling by myself that I wouldn’t be scared. Unfortunately fear doesn’t work that way. I can tell you that I am older, wiser and perhaps more prepared for that step than I was three years ago. And this time around, it might scare me but I know it is something that I can do.
