Papa Doesn't Care

As the origins of this blog have shown, I love to travel and experience life in other places. As I’ve traveled more, I like the tourist offerings less and prefer to spend time becoming a regular at a restaurant or sitting in a park observing the people. In Argentina I opted for working for the skydiving company just to have a group of friends and something to do every day from 9am-9pm in a small town with virtually no tourists.

My recent move into the world of international athletics has offered some new and exciting opportunities in travel: Mom on the Road. I recently made a trip to Italy for a junior Freeski competition, herding 21 young athletes through Milan and the mountains north (where I also learned how to drive stick on mountainsides and in Milan city traffic, read earlier post).

It’s one thing to get my stalling self into the airport. Then comes “storing” my car in the rental car spots without Enterprise thinking I’m returning the orange Jeep while I run through the airport looking for any flat-brimmed hats trying to buy espresso from a vending machine while their skis lay in piles nearby. 

Then comes the “time killing” phase in which I’ve just collected four jetlagged teenagers and have two hours before the fifth arrives. Luckily in some cases I have the companionship of one of the coaches who has the desire and the insanity to drive a 9-passenger van into downtown Milan just to see the big church. So we go, we find parking, we don’t scrape off an entire side of the car - though that would never surprise me – and we head for the pigeon-filled, photo opportunity that is Milan’s duomo. 

The kids, not knowing what’s hitting them, start taking corn kernels from immigrants, allowing their friends to take pictures of them feeding the flying street rats. Little do they know these African men will indeed expect money for their troubles, and their Middle Eastern friend will definitely be trying to put a bracelet on their wrists (and expecting money). I herd and herd, shooing the strangers away, trying to make the athletes feel better about the fact that they just gave away 20 Euro in 19 seconds, and trying to get out of the plaza before more corn ends up in our hands.

As we're making our way off the square, I find the coach who brought us there, laughing as he mulls over the scene he's just witnessed. "That was funny, they just attacked you guys" to which I obviously thanked him for his help. And after a few more "NO"s to bracelet offers, we've almost made it away from the chaos when one final hand full of corn makes its way into our ranks. I tell everyone else just to not look. The one athlete reluctantly took the corn and doesn't care about the photo. The Syrian man says "HEY! PHOTO!" but we keep walking. He runs up beside our coach, "PAPA! Photo of your son!", met with an incredulous nonchalance and "Papa"'s response: "Papa doesn't care about his son."

And on we go, to ogle the Prada store in our North Face rain coats, eat paninis, and drive our manual transmissions back to the mountains.