The flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport arrived an hour early due to a tailwind that reached 184 mph over the north Atlantic. At one point, our ground speed was 720 mph—not too shabby. It felt like we were on a rocket. Unfortunately, the same winds that blew us across the Atlantic created havoc with flights leaving Amsterdam, and we were delayed four hours on the flight to Rome.
But not a big deal. We arrived in Rome around 5 PM and took a taxi to our apartment. It was a long day of flying, but we quickly took an inventory of needed kitchen supplies and food for the first couple of days and headed for the nearest supermarket about three blocks from here. It’s not exactly a “super” market in the sense of being gigantic, but it had pretty much all we needed. With packaging very different and labels in Italian, it took some time to figure out the difference between, for instance, dish-washing liquid and liquid hand soap. And grocery stores are not laid out like in the U.S. Eggs are not refrigerated here, so you won’t usually find them near the dairy case. And paper products are very costly in Europe. They don’t have the kinds of forests and a paper industry the size of ours. As a result packages of paper towels, napkins, etc. are of modest size, and these products are not wasted. We Americans will grind through a roll of paper towels in a heart beat. Not here. It’s a great reminder to me that there is not an inexhaustible supply of trees and paper products in the world and we shouldn’t waste so much.
As I thought back on the day, the most satisfying part of the trip was the two couples we met during the delay at Schiphol Airport. They are Dutch and were on our flight to Rome. One was celebrating a birthday and the other was a recently retired couple trying to see a little more of the world. It’s amazing how open these people are about their lives—how they live and what they believe. They are also well traveled, well educated and very much up on what is happening in the U.S.
But it was the simplicity of their lives and the joy they took in it that so impressed me.
One couple drove a small Opel and lived in a house that sounded not much bigger. She takes her bike to and from work, about six miles each day, and does it both for the exercise and to put less carbon into the air. She said she knew her little car was not putting that big of a dent in the ozone layer, but she wanted to do her part. She has a vegetable and fruit chart on her refrigerator so she can buy these things only when they’re in season; she doesn’t want more fuel used to bring produce to her from afar.
These people are amazing and humbling to talk to—such a sense of community and personal responsibility! I was embarrassed to tell her we drove two cars that swallowed up about three times as much gas as she and her husband were using.
I’m sure these folks have their own struggles, disappointments and challenges as we all do. But they seemed so at peace with their lives. It’s not that the Dutch have everything right and we Americans have it all wrong. We do some things pretty darn well ourselves. But I couldn’t help but admire the kinds of lives they seemed to lead and the values they shared. They were very polite about it, but they looked dismayed and almost embarrassed for us about what was happening to our country. It seemed as though they were talking about a dear friend who had inexplicably gone mad.
I started out less than happy about the four-hour delay, but it ended up being the best part of the day. In fact, often the best part of traveling is the people we meet along the way. There is a certain camaraderie and anonymity when traveling that invites people to share things about themselves they might not otherwise share. It’s quite a gift we strangers can give to one another.
