Vlad

I arrived in Rome with a very simple plan: get a suitcase, drive to the hotel, throw my things on the bed and go for a walk around the city. I didn't plan any adventures, new acquaintances, or stories that I would like to tell someone later, because after a long flight, the only thing I wanted was a shower, coffee, and at least half an hour to sit quietly and stare at the ceiling. But Rome, as it turned out, decided to slightly adjust my program even before I had time to see the Colosseum. The suitcase that wasn't mine At Fiumicino Airport, I quickly found the right tape and stood waiting for my luggage, watching as people one by one picked up their suitcases and disappeared towards the exit. After a while, my suitcase appeared on the tape, at least I was quite sure of it, because it looked almost the same as mine: dark, large and with a small sticker on the side. I grabbed it, put it on the floor, and was about to leave when, for some reason, I decided to check the tag. And here my first Roman adventure awaited me, although I still had no idea how useful it would be. The name on the tag was completely foreign, and at that moment I realized that I had just left the airport with great confidence with someone else's things. The funny thing is that the suitcase really looked so much like mine that I even had time to mentally imagine opening it in a hotel and finding someone else's clothes, a pair of socks and, perhaps, a very personal story of some Italian tourist. I put someone else's suitcase back and waited for mine, but the tape gradually emptied, and my luggage was still missing. At first I thought he was just delayed, then I started hoping that he would be unloaded on the next belt, and after a few minutes I was already looking at the empty baggage conveyor with such an expression on my face, as if he had personally decided to ruin my first day in Italy. The second victim of my suitcase I went to the lost baggage counter, where I tried to explain to the airport employee that my suitcase hadn't arrived, although I wasn't even completely sure if it was really lost. At that moment, a girl turned out to be nearby, who was also holding a luggage tag in her hands and looked about as confused as me. She looked at me and asked if I had accidentally seen a large gray suitcase with a red ribbon. I replied that I had seen too many suitcases and now I didn't trust anyone at all, including my own. She laughed, and it was from that moment on that our acquaintance, which began with the lost luggage, stopped being just an attempt to sort out the problem. It turned out that her suitcase hadn't arrived either. Moreover, we arrived on the same flight and, as it turned out a few minutes later, our suitcases somehow went to the wrong place altogether. We were standing at the counter, trying to make sense of what was happening, translating the words of the airport staff to each other, and at some point we were laughing more than nervous. Rome didn't start according to plan at all After a while, they explained to us that the luggage had been found and was due to be delivered later, but no one could say exactly when this would happen. I looked at my watch, then at the girl, then back at my watch, and realized that my carefully thought-out plan for my first day in Rome could safely be thrown away along with my boarding pass. We talked and found out that both had arrived in Rome for the first time, both were going to walk around the city with almost no clear route and both were hungry. The latter circumstance turned out to be the most important, because after several hours of travel and nerves, I didn't want to talk about the cultural program at all, but I really wanted to find a normal pasta. We decided to get out of the airport first and go to the city, and then figure out what to do next. To be honest, now I don't understand why I agreed to go with a complete stranger, but at that moment it seemed absolutely natural. Maybe I didn't care anymore after I lost my suitcase, or maybe sometimes traveling just starts when you stop trying to control every little thing. The first walk in Rome In Rome, we just went for a walk without any particular plan. We talked, joked about our airport disaster, and tried several times to remember exactly where we had left the right street, even though it had only been ten minutes since we saw it. Then there was a small restaurant where we ordered pasta, which, after the airport adventure, seemed to me to be almost the best meal of my life. We were sitting at a table, discussing travel, work, cities that we wanted to see, and gradually I caught myself thinking that I had completely forgotten about my suitcase. But a few hours ago, I was ready to write a statement about the loss of luggage, accuse fate of personal hostility and spend the whole evening at the hotel in one set of clothes. Now I was sitting in Rome with a man I shouldn't have met at all, and I realized that the day was shaping up to be much more interesting than any pre-planned itinerary. How did it end In the evening, we were actually informed that the luggage had been found. We went back to get our things, picked up our suitcases, and it seemed like we should have said goodbye, because the problem was solved, and the chance acquaintance had come to a logical end. But for some reason we didn't say goodbye. The next day we met again, then again, and eventually we walked around Rome together for several days, although initially everyone came here completely alone. We saw the Colosseum, walked through the Roman Forum, reached the Trevi Fountain and were completely shamelessly mistaken several times, although everyone had a map in their phone. When it was time to leave, I suddenly realized one simple thing: if my suitcase had arrived on time, I probably would never have met her. I would get out of the airport, go to the hotel, take a shower, change clothes, and go for a walk along my pre-planned route, and this meeting just wouldn't happen. Now, when I think of Rome, the first thing I think about is not the Colosseum or even the Trevi Fountain. I remember an empty luggage belt, someone else's suitcase, which I almost took, and a complete stranger, with whom we first tried to find the lost luggage, and then quite accidentally found each other. This is probably one of the main attractions of traveling. You can spend months planning a route, booking a hotel, buying tickets, and making a list of places you definitely need to see, and then one lost suitcase completely changes your plans and gives you a memory that wasn't in any guidebook.

There are places that I've reviewed so many photos of in advance that it felt like I'd already been there. The Lauterbrunnen Valley in Switzerland was just one of those: green meadows, neat wooden houses, huge mountains and waterfalls that fall directly from the cliffs, and in the background it all looks like someone specially painted the perfect landscape for a tourist calendar. I looked at these photos and prepared myself in advance for a little disappointment, because the camera can do a lot, especially if the photographer knows the right angle, the light and knows how to remove everything unnecessary from the frame. Therefore, I went there in a rather calm mood and mentally repeated to myself that nothing supernatural should be expected. Well, Switzerland is beautiful, of course, but I've already seen these mountains on the Internet dozens of times. As it turned out, the Internet did me a disservice in this case: it showed me beautiful photos, but it completely failed to prepare me for what I would see in reality. The first minutes in Lauterbrunnen When I first saw the valley with my own eyes, I literally had to stop in the middle of the road and just look around for a few seconds. A huge green valley opened up in front of me, surrounded by almost sheer cliffs, and waterfalls flowed down from different heights, which in the photos just seemed like beautiful white stripes. It all looked so big in person that I suddenly felt like a man who had accidentally wandered into the set of a very expensive movie and was now afraid to admit to the crew that he didn't have a pass. The funniest thing happened when I took out my phone to take the first photo. I pointed the camera, looked at the screen and found there was just a beautiful landscape, although in front of me was something completely different in feeling and scale. I took a few more shots from different angles, zoomed in, moved away, zoomed in again, and eventually realized that the problem wasn't with the phone, but with me: I was trying to cram an entire valley into a palm-sized rectangle. Waterfalls that are impossible to photograph properly One of the main impressions for me was the Staubbach waterfall, which falls from a great height directly from a cliff. It looks very impressive in the photos, but in reality its scale is perceived in a completely different way, because you stand below and see how the water from a height of about three hundred meters turns into a thin silver ribbon, and then dissolves somewhere below. At the same time, you don't just look at the waterfall, but you hear the water, feel the cool air and realize how huge the rock is in front of you. Of course, I started photographing again, because a person who came to Switzerland and did not take a photo of a waterfall will not forgive himself later. I took one shot, the second, the third, looked at the screen and realized that in the photo the waterfall looks much more modest than in real life, so I decided to just put the phone away and watch. It was probably the first time during the whole trip that I realized that sometimes the best photo is the one you didn't take at all. When nature decided to spoil my plans a little I came to Lauterbrunnen hoping for a beautiful clear sky, because I had already drawn the perfect picture in my head: a green valley, blue sky, sun, mountains, and I was somewhere in the middle of this splendor, preferably without signs of fatigue on my face. Nature apparently decided that it would not be too easy for me, and gradually began to cover the peaks with clouds. At first, I was upset because I was already mentally imagining photos with perfect light, and then I noticed how the fog was slowly starting to descend the slopes. And then the unexpected happened: the valley became even more beautiful. The clouds hid part of the mountains, the waterfalls turned almost silvery, the light became soft, and the whole valley acquired a completely different atmosphere, a little mysterious and even fabulous. I was standing under a raincoat that looked much less romantic than I had imagined before the trip, and I was thinking that nature had just explained to me quite convincingly why you shouldn't plan your perfect photo too carefully. Switzerland, where everything looks too neat I actually liked how harmonious everything looks in Lauterbrunnen. Small wooden houses, green fields, mountain roads, waterfalls and cows with bells seem to have existed here for several centuries and are not going to adapt to tourists with phones at all. Even the cows looked like they understood the local philosophy better than I did: take your time, chew grass calmly, and don't try to check every five minutes whether you look good enough in a photo. I walked through the valley and several times caught myself thinking that if I saw such a picture on the Internet, I would probably think that the photographer had overdone the processing a little. But then I turned my head and saw almost the same thing in front of me, only even more beautiful and voluminous. At some point, I even began to suspect that the Swiss had deliberately built all this so that tourists would feel like losers with their phones. The moment when I stopped taking pictures The most interesting thing happened towards the end of the walk, when I realized that I already had enough photos, but none of them conveyed the main thing. There are mountains, waterfalls, houses and green fields in the pictures, but there is no feeling of air, silence, coolness and that strange feeling when you stand in the middle of a valley and realize how huge the world around you is. A photograph can show a place, but it doesn't know how to convey how you feel in it at all. So I just put my phone in my pocket and walked for a while without taking anything off. For a man who came to such beauty with a fully charged phone and big plans for photos, it was almost an act of inner maturation. The place that turned out to be better than the photos When I went to Lauterbrunnen, I was sure that I already knew about what was waiting for me. I saw dozens of photos, knew about the famous waterfalls, imagined the valley, and even chose the places where I wanted to take pictures in advance, but the reality was still completely different. It was louder, more spacious, cooler, bigger, and for some reason much more emotional than any photo I had seen before the trip. That is why Lauterbrunnen remained in my memory not as another beautiful point on the map of Switzerland, but as a place that made me stop looking at the screen for the first time in a long time. I went there to take photos, and I left with a memory of that morning when I stood in the middle of a huge valley, looked at waterfalls and mountains and thought of only one thing.: "That's really something that photographs can't convey."