Katie Botkin

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Italy:

I’m lying on a bench watching everyone else crowd into the boarding line when I see a familiar figure, dressed in the olive jumpsuit of the Italian Navy-Coastguard, heading towards me, scanning the crowd. He hasn’t seen me yet. I sit up and wave.

“Botkin!” he says, and plops down next to me. I laugh.

“What are you doing here?” I ask “How did you get through?”

He lifts his I.D. card and says he can go just about anywhere in an Italian airport. “I just landed,” he adds.

“How was Naples?” I ask him. He nods. I eye the line; people are disappearing into the airplane, so I ask him to stand with me. He’s been waiting with me for all of five minutes, and I’m the last in line, when I hug him goodbye. I hate this part of these friendships I make when I travel. Although, sometimes, I do see people again when I least expect it, as evidenced by this very meeting.

And who knows? Maybe I haven’t seen the last of Alex yet.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Italy:

“Alex,” I say.

“Tell me,” he responds.

“How do you get to the airport from your house?” I know he has to leave early for work, and he doesn’t exactly live near the bus station. If I need a taxi, I’ll have to arrange it in advance.

“Oh, you can walk,” says Alex “It takes ten or fifteen minutes.”

As I shower and emerge with dripping wet hair, he draws me a map. The next morning, after he’s flown away to Naples to have some maintenance done on his airplane, I follow this drawing dutifully, rolling my suitcase behind me.

It’s a tiny airport, and, for a second, I wonder if it’s a train station. But it isn’t, and I really have just walked to an airport for the first time ever, luggage and everything.

The church in Vasto, Italy. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Italy:

On the way back to Pescara, we stop in Vasto, which has been a nice town since the days of the Roman Empire, for some pizza, meeting up with one of Alex’s friends in the process. Our table has no adornment, so Alex runs outside to pick a small bouquet of flowers and sets it in a cup.

“You know that not all Italian men are like this,” Fatma tells me. I nod sagely.

After the pizza, we take a night tour of the town. The sidewalks are made of marble, softly glistening under the street lamps, and we can see the curve of the bay below, glowing with lights. We walk through one wall of a cathedral, the rest of which fell into the sea a couple of decades ago. And where there was supposed to be a parking lot, there’s a collection of Roman ruins.

“That’s the problem with doing any construction around here,” says Alex’s friend, our impromptu guide. “You run the risk of finding ruins and not being able to complete anything.”