第52页 Italy or "Say it like you eat it" or 36 tales about the pursuit of pleasure

I'm bad (or, rather, lazy) at researching a place before I travel, tending just to show up and see what happens. When you travel like this way, what typically "happens" is that you end up spending a lot of time standing in the middle of the train station feeling confused, or dropping way too much money on hotels because you don't know better. My shaky sense of direction and geography means I have explored six continents in my life with only the vaguest idea of where I am at any given time. Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisbility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know—that super-relaxed, totaly-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of a riot in jakarta. Oh, no. When I don't know what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought. As David once put it, "You have the opposite of poker face. You have, like...miniature golf face."