It’s beyond me why anyone would want to read an article about someone bragging about their tropical getaway vacation, but apparently there’s high demand for this. No skin off my nose.

Italy is nice this time of year. Filled with tourists and evil selfie-stick salesmen, but one can only ask for so much.

To be honest, I approached this trip with unshifting apathy.

“You’re going to Italy? When?!”

“Eh, I don’t know.”

Previous school excursions for me usually consisted of:

1.) Sitting alone during meals, on buses and in general

2.) Getting left behind

3.) Bad food

Which sounds extreme, but such is the life of a serial recluse.

But for the first time ever, it wasn’t like that. More or less.

Instead, there were explorations through ancient palaces (with friends) and silly pictures on gondolas (with friends) and gelato eaten on sidewalks and steps and piazzas (with friends).

Speaking of food. There’s isn’t a better place on earth to get food. Everything, except for the salad, which was terrible, was wonderful. And I don’t even like pasta. I can say that eating pizza and gelato everyday is certainly nice after the amount of walking you do makes you want to kill yourself.

The architecture is beautiful. It’s kind of comical to imagine how many pictures everyone took of regular people’s houses now that I think of it. But they were cool.

Protip: Bring a transformer for your plugs, or you might knock the power out of two hotel rooms. It’s not like I did that or anything, but y’know it could totally happen… to anyone.

Also. Don’t make eye contact with street vendors or their stuff. Unless you have a drill sergeant voice, they will follow you onto the bus. You can only hear the word “selfie, selfie, selfie” so many times before you spontaneously develop one it seems.

We’ve gotten to the part of the article where we need to talk about someone special.

It’s time to talk about Ricardo.

The tour guide.

Do you ever just… hear someone’s name and automatically form an opinion about them? Never in my life have I met a person who could wear two sweatshirts and jeans in 70+ degree weather, yet there he was.

I honestly don’t know if he was human. Blink, and he’d be gone, or off the bus, twenty yards away buying tickets.

I guess I did have fun for once, in the end. Don’t tell anyone.