It’s an abandoned university dorm room in the middle of the night. The place gets eerie at this time of year, when all the undergraduates are gone, except for a few straggling seniors awaiting graduation. My friend is an artist and uses her oversized single as a studio. She says, “It’s great—I keep lumber, and power tools, and all sorts of things in there.” She grew up on a farm in a “very rural blue-collar part of Wisconsin” that afforded her about 20 acres of personal space. One of her first worldly experiences was when she traveled to Siena at age 16 to do an apprenticeship with a 50-year-old painter. Her parents shipped her off with a little duffel bag, and she arrived at the man’s falling down house in the middle of the Tuscan countryside.

Her Sienese painter/master was a typical Italian man…he would grab the paint brush out of her hand and smack her with it if he didn’t like what she was doing. Plus, he expected her to cook him dinner. She mixed his oil paints for him and ran away to the city whenever possible. The best part about authentic travel experience is that, after enough time has passed since the traumatic ‘culturally enriching’ period, you always look back on it with fondness, even if it involved a middle-aged creeper and crying yourself to sleep every night.

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