Travel, I Guess So, But Why?

TRAVEL, I GUESS SO, BUT WHY???
We recently returned from a wonderful trip over seas during which we spent several days touring places we have dreamed of but never thought we would see. When we returned home everyone asked, "Did you enjoy your trip", and "What was the most memorable?"
Well, to answer the first question we have to say, "Yes, we enjoyed our trip". As to why, sometimes I have to question myself (and my wife) at some length. We came home bushed, beat, tired, and hardly relaxed. If you have never been to Italy, Sicily or any of those wonderful old places I can only suggest you should take the trip. Now I think it is only fair to let you know that in order to feel completely safe if is necessary to do a few things.
1. Be sure you have special pockets sewn inside your wearing apparel that no one can reach when you are in a crowd. Pick pockets are a valuable asset to the cities there and keep the economy rolling with stolen things like credit cards, Rolex watches and other things than can be easily removed from outside pockets, back packs and jackets left on chair backs.
2. Be sure you have mirrors welded on your glasses (if you wear glasses) so you can see many directions at the same time when walking across the streets where they have meaningless traffic lights. You must remember you are in a country where the green means you can go and hit anything in your path legally, yellow means too bad if you didn't move fast enough and red means look out, the bulls are
. .
mnmng agam.
3. Don't rent a car! This is a must for all beginning tourists in these countries. You will become the target for all those talented drivers that live there and there are thousands of them. Some drive cars the size of matchstick autos, others motor scoots that can zigzag through the busiest of traffic and then there are a few bicycle riders who like to see if you can dodge them as they whiz by barely missing you. Of course then there are those on the street too!
4. Learn how to park in precarious ways before attempting to do it there. Attempt to park where you would never dream of parking at home. A perfect example of this would be in front of fire hydrants straight in, not parallel, or on the comer where people have to walk around your vehicle. You may try to park on the sidewalk but be careful not to hit a pedestrian here, although that could be negotiable over there. Keep in mind there are two cars for every available space and the motor scoots are parked by the 100' s on every sidewalk, in alleys, and crevices where they should not fit in.
5. Learning the language would be helpful as well. Like Toilettel Keep you change handy as you will have to pay for anything from a place to do your duty, the paper required, or just the pleasure of being there. Also, when trying to find something you immediately know if you only speak English you are not welcome. All signs are written in any foreign language needed except the one you speak and if you only speak English you are in big trouble. And will be lost continuously.
6. Be aware of the money situation. Plan on spending twice as much as you had originally planned and bring back half of what you had hoped for. If money is not problem you can purchase needed articles like $3000.00 purses, $5000.00 dollar
suits and various and sundry other things you would never pay that much for at home.
Then as to "What was the most memorable?" The first thing that comes to my mind is 'huge'. The reason for this is every building we saw was extremely large. When we do a new office building we think in terms of alleys, sidewalks and other customer areas. They think in terms of filling the city block completely with a small walkway around the outside for parking motor scoots. Well, they might be an exaggeration, but the buildings do appear to take up the entire block and made of large blocks of cut out stone rather than the simple concrete formed things we use.
Another term could be 'old'. Of course we expected to see a lot of old things but what we did not consider is that to us old means a couple hundred years at the most. To them it is somewhere between a couple thousand and at least seven or eight hundred years old. New construction is still a couple of hundred years to yesterday, depending on which part of the city you may be touring.
All in all, we had a great trip, saw a lot of things we never thought we would see, and met a lot of wonderful people. Give it a shot, you'll love it.