Happy to be Home Again

All travelling TLs and friends are home now and, despite exhaustion and, in my case, a marked limping, we have been flung back into the fray of the work of schools (and accounting). It was a wonderful excursion. In addition to feet unequal to the task of walking all day long, I have learned that one or more of us suffered from Stendhal Syndrome -- that was the day Frances ran in distress through the Uffizi Gallery muttering about it being all too much, Jan went to look for her, Chris and Joanne were nowhere to be seen, and I wandered off into Florence in a fog, wondering if I would ever find them again. Stendahl Syndrome is also called Florentine Syndrome and is a common reaction to too much beauty, particularly evident in people who go to the Uffizi. Why didn't we know this before we went in!

News of the conference, you ask? Highlights will follow when jet lag and work-related shock have abated. I miss my daily gelati, pizza to die for, wine with lunch, and waking up laughing because my roommates were so much fun. It's hard to believe: five days in an apartemente in medieval Trastevere, above a bar, five days on an agriturismo (an olive farm) near Florence with drivers Beppe and Lorenzo to cart us off to unimaginable sights and shopping, three days in Venice in a five-star hotel where the room overlooked Venice and the pool on the roof looked out on the Adriatic and forever and vaporettos took us to unimaginable sights and shopping, and a conference that put our world of school libraries into the international context.

Life here in BC pales beside the Italian reality of walking daily through grade 8 history, of hot hot days and balmy evenings out in the piazzas and the narrow streets and steep hills, of shop windows each a tribute to Italian instincts for design and beauty, of the many Santa Marias de Tutti, of galleries and of days spent shopping for the ones we left behind. But my feet and my psyche, damaged by Stendhal Syndrome, are in need of the rest that sees me walk to the car, from the car to the elevator, from the elevator to my new little cubicle with a view of the intersection of Broadway and Granville where I can ponder all that I have seen and learned. I haven't had time to think ... only to remember a truly amazing experience with some dear dear teacher-librarians and an accountant with stamina.

Thanks, all, for the company and adventures you created. We are going to get together soon to compile the photo account and divvy up the writing about the conference.