Two Million Envelopes

While checking out at Trader Joe's this morning, I opened my Alexa app to make sure I got all the necessary and asked-for items. One line on my list was unexpected - "two million envelopes." I texted the family chat to see if anyone really needed envelopes, and shook my head at Alexa's spendthrift ways and lack of concern for the environment.

Which of course brings me back to our Italian vacation. European countries have much less space and fewer resources than we have in the US, so they use both more economically and in environmentally friendly ways. In Florence we couldn't find paper products anywhere, and we had to look after spilling red wine on the kitchen table in the VRBO (repeatedly). No napkins, towels, or other wasteful items - only sponges and dishcloths that had permanently changed colors by the time of our departure.

Also a source of amazement - ages-old fountains in certain city squares and taps that perpetually run, offering clean water to anyone stopping by with chapped lips or a reusable water bottle. We filled up at taps all over Venice and even Rome, receiving clean, free water in the middle of the city at sources that were established hundreds (or more) years ago.

Cars are small, streets are small, apartments - you guessed it - small. When Tiziano told us that our VRBO in Venice was his childhood home, we walked around and marveled at how the space could hold an entire family and their (for lack of a better word) household junk. Then we realized that there was no space for household junk - no storage for Christmas decor, baby objects, high school letter jackets, ancient photo albums, and the like. They must have just got rid of all the stuff we accumulate, because there are no public storage spaces for rent in Italy, none that we saw, anyway.

We usually travel abroad with one small roller bag and one backpack per person, so we each got used to traveling with less, wearing the same clothes repeatedly, and eating the food from each apartment before we left it. Because each household in Italy has a maximum amount of electricity they can use per day, we were warned to turn off lights and air conditioning whenever we left the apartment, and not to run too many appliances at the same time. One of our GF restaurants in Rome ran afowl of this provision and we sat through a blackout one night when a few too many watts were demanded of the system.

The Italians we saw live perfectly well with a little less, a sense of limits. In fact, they live better in some ways; they eat better food, have better public transportation, put less stress on the earth and have better fashion sense. Not too many European women walking around in athleisure gear; I had to up my game just to be a tourist!  I came back with a strong desire to get rid of as much as possible, to live bigger while making my footstep a little smaller.