Though the flying route looks simple on the map , the airlines have their own strategy to make it look very complicated. They confuse us with their various options of connecting place A to place B. For every imaginable flight leaving your home town you have to take a detour, stop at another destination and from there take another connecting flight to continue your second phase of journey. A crow-fly connection is seldom available or affordable. To complicate matters further the stop over may range from one hour to sixteen hours or more. Getting on the right plane at all awkward hours of the twenty four hour clock is the biggest time machine challenge of any travel plan.

When my husband and I become travel partners all such minor issues invariably get compounded into a snow ball. The differences between our personalities show up ten times more magnified. If he is Chalk then I am Cheese. He leaves a mark when he speaks, I on the other hand melt and freeze a hundred times a day ! He is calm and decisive , I am lost and impatient. He is a planner, I am a dreamer, he is finance, I am romance ! But together we make a fine team or so we believe. When it is time to travel he likes to delve deep into the mathematical equations of permutation-combination to get the best deal possible. Our black board of planning is marked heavily by chalk, and the flights of fantasies keep melting like cheese.

So, the flight which had taken off in part 1 of the journey journal lands at Amsterdam in the morning . Between our landing and boarding another flight we had exactly one hour to find a new gate, go through security and immigration and then board for Rome. In that precious one hour I got into my hundred meter sprinter mode ready to run. Looking out for my partner I find him standing in front of a huge electronic board trying to understand it’s working ! There are more than fifty flight details and before I can read half way through the screen changes to another set of new information. If we had a sixteen hour lay over I would have loved to stare at this complicated board to locate my flight , but at this point with about fifty five minutes to go the impatient ‘me’ in the ‘I’ chose to seek human assistance from a counter marked ‘Information’. But my man is still transfixed in front of the electronic board, I literally had to pull him apart from this hypnotized transfixed gaze at the board. Thank God for the running shoes it helped us to reach finishing line just in time to board the flight. Panting and ranting together we settled down in our seats to continue flying for a few more hours.

Cheese starts melting (as though placed on some hot pizza ) even before touchdown in Italy. Aah Rome ! Rome of Romulus and Remus, Rome of the seven kings, Rome of Julius Caesar and Brutus, Rome of Antony and Cleopatra . An eternal city weaving myth and history into tales of ambition, love , loyalty, power, betrayal, an eternal theme running and ruining our life through the ages. I feel the attraction like magic, I feel impatience to see it all with a birds eye view, but to see history I have to learn patience, have to learn to walk the roads and hold the thoughts.

No matter how tired and wary we felt as travelers the euphoria of reaching Rome kept our feet busy. A driver and a car were supposed to be waiting for us. Chalk was sure his name would be written on a white piece of paper with black marker and held by a man in waiting. While he went in search of his name in a foreign land , I stood guarding our suitcases. On the other hand the driver who had come to meet us at the airport had decided to find us without holding any placard. He trusted his deduction skills, after all how many Indians can alight a flight looking like Chalk and Cheese ! So this man located me and came towards me grinning broadly and spoke in fluent Italian. I heard him out intently andconfirmed affirmative with a noddy- nod. I could not have missed my Chalk’s name and ‘India’ , even if he had whispered. The Italian driver thought I understood his mother tongue and showed me extra favor by offering to carry my suitcase. Grinning mysteriously at Chalk, I thought to myself the power of silent speech. The husband repeated our friend’s address to the driver some four times and then sat back quietly. The car moved through the broad streets and by lanes of Rome and finally stopped in front of a smart looking apartment building and the driver announced in broken English “I drive no more”. My surprised husband checked out the address for the fifth time and started telling the driver ” I drive no more ” will not work. Somehow I got the joke, our driver was just being funny. I patted Chalk on the shoulder and showed him the building number, we had reached our destination .We got off the taxi, bag baggage n all and waved bye to our witty Italian driver.

Our very kind hostess and the girl who calls me Di, welcomed us with open arms into her warm home. For the next few days she became our tour planner, guide, host, friend and family. Her house was decorated like mini India, an Indian oasis in the middle of Italy. She had a charpoy from Punjab, mirrored cushions from Gujrat, terracota horses from Bengal, it was simple, beautiful and home ; reflecting the artistic senses of the artist herself. She showed us her new home, her Rome…to us, in her own style. We roamed the city in the most unconventional, non touristy fashion. We ate, drank, walked, took bus rides, sat by the road to rest our feet, and seeped in as much of Rome and of being Roman as we could in that short span of few days. My friend spoke fluent Italian, had friends all over the city, and kept herself immensely busy while her diplomat husband performed his official duties. We have a special soft corner in our heart for this amazing couple. Rome was not built in a day and we could not do justice to the centuries of history, architecture and art in the short time we had , yet every experience made us feel very rich and left us wanting for more.

Venice and Florence , the two must-see places were squeezed into our tight itinerary. Like young bag packers Chalk and Cheese walked the paver blocked roads of Venice and Florence tasting flavors of Italy. Standing in the Piazza San Marco square of Venice, seeing tourists throng from all across the globe , I noticed something amusing and closer to home. I saw young Bangladeshi immigrants selling roses and reproductions of famous paintings and playing hide and seek with the patrolling police. The gondolas looked so colorful and being rowed by such handsome looking men, I could not have ignored them even if I wanted to. Sailing on the gondola I sang our ( Indians ) one and only ‘gondola anthem’ ,”Ye kashti wala kya gaa raha hai ” and embarrassed my husband every bit. But what could I do, this was my melting point of emotions, and I am Cheese after all ! I My son had prepared me with his version of the dramatized history of Florence, he had made me watch ” Medici: Masters Of Florence” on Netflix. Therefore when we walked through the narrow city lanes of Florence, when we stood mesmerized in front of The Brunelleschi’s Dome or popularly known as Duomo Di Firenze , I saw the stories of past unfolding. I saw Florence from the view point of the Medici dynasty, of how a banker family came to power and ruled Florence through the Renaissance , encouraging art and artists like never before.

As we walked those streets of Italy at some point we got lost only to find each other again, at some point someone thought I was a Spanish woman, at some point he discovered a new drink called ‘ spritz ‘, at some point we took selfies like kids, at some point we stumbled, at some point we held hands, and at some point we fell in love again. After our short romance with Italy we boarded another plain to fly to the city that never sleeps.