Quite a while ago, I prayed a novena to Saint Rita, and my petition was granted. One of the conditions of the novena is that you must publish it if your request is granted. Recently I remembered this, so I am publishing the fact that my petition was granted.
Joel and I have been in Rome for about ten days now.
Now that all the dust has settled, things are looking a lot better. Both my phone and Joel's ring have been recovered. I still maintain that I knew it was in his bag the whole time, since he had it the night before and didn't leave the house with it, but he was without it until our third or fourth day here. After a few days lounging around this fabulous apartment, we finally took all of our dirty laundry to a laundromat by the train station and cleaned it. The next day , I pulled the clean clothes out of our backpacks and began folding my laundry to put into the dresser in our room. After emptying Joel's pack, I turned his backpack upside-down to empty it, and suddenly there it was. I stared at it in disbelief for a moment, lying there on the bed next to a rumpled undershirt. And then I began to laugh, kind of like a crazy woman.
Getting my phone back was more straightforward. The day after we landed in Milan, I e-mailed the lost and found department (the "fundbuero") at the Frankfurt airport, describing what my phone (and charger, and converter box) looked like and precisely where we'd lost it. They responded asking for the passcode to verify, and then responded promptly that they'd found it and requested an address to send it back to me. After filling out a simple shipping form, I got my beloved Galaxy S2 back for the bargain price of 32,70 euro.
I think our time in Italy will be a nice interval between leaving the Orient and going home. We very conveniently stumbled into an Ash Wednesday Mass at St. Bartholomew's Cathedral in Frankfurt, and then looked around the church after the service. It was beautiful, but Joel and I both agreed that it was extremely weird to walk around on a wooden floor without first taking off our shoes. I have particularly enjoyed returning to Rome and being able to wander into random basilicas (they are everywhere here) or see paintings and sculptures of saints whose stories I know and can actively relate to. Moving from passive observer to active participant in places of worship is a fascinating transition, but more than anything I am grateful to be in a place where I don't feel so incredibly distant from my own faith. Objectively, I know that God is omnipresent and Christ is always with me, but it was harder to keep that in mind in Japan, where every tree, statue, and mirror is an object of worship.
Speaking of divine providence, Joel and I scored a really sweet deal here in Rome. After our reservation in Venice fell through, we scrambled to find another place to stay and eventually settled on a much cheaper arrangement in Rome. The listing on AirBnB described it as a room in an Italian couple's house, which was not at all what we had envisioned, but we stood to save some money, so we bit the bullet and just took it. When we arrived from Canazei, however, we discovered - to our delight - that we would have a separate apartment, shared only with an older Argentine woman who mostly keeps to herself (and occasionally does our dishes). Definitely for the best, since the couple has a newborn and two noisy dogs!
The apartment is spacious and gorgeous - fifteen-foot ceilings, a massive library of old hardcover books in the living room, a four-fixture bathroom, and a small balcony with a view of the Tiber river. The weather has been perfect - nothing but sunny days, and we don't need our jackets anymore. The neighborhood is a suburb on the north side of the city, near the Villa Borghese. There is a massive pedestrian bridge just down the street where I can work out in the evenings, and we are close to public transportation.
It's an idyllic space for us to be in limbo. When we are not sightseeing, I quell my anxiety about finding a job by trolling job search websites and obsessively editing my resume. (I think I have updated the resume I sent to USAID six times.) Meanwhile, Joel checks his e-mail constantly as he waits for an admission decision from American University in DC. I am applying to jobs in both places, but it only makes sense to apply for government positions this far ahead of time; meanwhile, I am freaking out over the fact that I will be home in less than four weeks and we still have no idea what city we are moving to. But life goes on. We mailed our tax return off yesterday. Joel's bank card got eaten by an ATM. We buy groceries, we cook, we watch TV and eat gelato and drink coffee and wine.
I suppose there are worse places to be.
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