Italy Part Uno: Unexpected airplane soap opera

**Blogger isn't letting me put spaces between paragraphs where I want to, so I'm sorry for the unwieldy blocks of text below.**

On January 5th, 2010, I traveled to Minneapolis and boarded a plane from there to Amsterdam. From there I--and seventeen other students and professors--flew to Venice. (Here's why.)

I sat by an elderly woman with curly blonde-ish hair and a wrinkly, craggy face on the big flight. We exchanged first names. She called herself Bert, short for Bertha. (I would probably go by Bert too.) Bert told me that she was going on a European cruise starting from Rome with a friend and her daughter, who has MS. Cruises are the easiest vacations for the woman with MS to take. I told her I was headed to Italy on a school trip and then the plane took off. We kept talking.

What started as fairly ordinary small talk, however, became an enthralling story that unwound over the eight hour flight between movie watching, plane food eating, and Bert's settling in with her sleep mask. Turns out Bert wasn't just going on a European cruise--she was also going to Paris to meet a long-lost niece.

(!!!)

When Bert's brother was stationed in Germany in the 1960s, he went to Paris and met a woman named Cristiana. (Bert didn't say she was beautiful, but I'm sure she was.) Cristiana got pregnant but didn't tell Bert's brother about the baby. He went back to the U.S. not knowing that he was a father. "It's just like one of those crazy soap operas," Bert said.

Bert said that her brother talked about bringing Cristiana to the states, but that never happened. He married someone else, had two kids, and died twelve years ago.

Last year Bert got a phone call from a woman named Barbara, a Search Angel. Years ago Barbara was reunited with a long-lost relative and was deeply touched by the event. Now, she volunteers her time as a Search Angel, helping others find their long-lost relatives and loved ones.

Barbara told Bert that she was about to hear something strange and told her about her niece. Bert almost hung up, but she heard Barbara out, and Barbara left it up to Bert to follow through. After some careful thinking, Bert hesitantly contacted her niece, who is now forty-eight years old. The niece sent photo albums from her childhood; she looked just like Bert's late mother.

The icing on the evidence cake was a picture of Cristiana with Bert's brother. (Bert's brother brought one home just like it.) The niece lives in France and has a sister in Paris who speaks English, which is helpful since Bert doesn't speak French.

I asked Bert how she felt about the upcoming meeting, and she said she was excited and anxious: this was likely to be a closure-filled emotional event. The niece originally searched for her father, but since he's dead, Bert is standing in for him.

The flight landed in Amsterdam, we parted, and I hope her meeting went well.

I stumbled off the big flight feeling absolutely exhausted. It was about midnight my time, and I'm terrible at sleeping on planes. It was about 7 AM in Amsterdam. We had a connecting flight to Venice, but first we had to go through passport control and security screening, and I've got to say that Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport--besides being beautiful and possessing random doors in the middle of hallways that open to nowhere and entertained my friends and I to no end--has the happiest security workers I have ever seen. There was smiling. There was small talk. There was a man in an important looking uniform bellowing out, "Old MacDonald Had a Farm". I can still hear him singing "E I E I Oooo!" in my head.

In Venice the vaporetto, or water bus, that we took to reach our hotel landed near where I'd seen the accordion player in July 2007, but he wasn't there this time. Hardly anyone was. (People aren't kidding when they say that January is Venice's slow month, when it belongs to Venetians more than to tourists.)

I have lots more to tell, and many pictures to show (I didn't even get to that today) but the Bert story is probably enough for now :)

(In other news, I highly recommend visiting Stephanie Perkins's blog. She is in Paris researching for her novel, Anna and the French Kiss, and recently crowned the hottest guy in the Louvre. (As in the ones depicted in the art, not the living visitors.))