In 1992, my late grandmother made a last minute decision to treat the Young family to a Mediterranean cruise. I was a senior in high school and the dates of the trip overlapped with my Advanced Placement tests. At 17 years old, I made the very adult decision to skip the trip and stay home alone to take my AP tests. My family went without me.
I’ve always wanted to see Rome.
As Oriental DreamWorks implodes and my years at DreamWorks draw to a close, I decided to spend my final “home visit” plane ticket to spend Christmas in Rome. There’s a certain beautiful symmetry to all of this:
- My family didn’t pay to take me to Rome, but a quarter of a century later I had my company pay for it.
- When I first visited Shanghai in 2013, my lowest point was weeping in an Italian restaurant as I watched the entirety of The Bicycle Thief projected on the wall.
- After all my visits to Xi’an and the Hexi Corridor, it seems fitting to visit the far Western end of the Silk Road.