im gonna tell what happened when i was in europe and why i went there...
first of all, the backstory:
My grandfather born in Italy, he was an electrician. Before the ww2 there was a rumor which was if you got married with someone you didnt have to join the militia, so he got married with someone random but unfortunately he had to be part of the ww2 because that rumor was fake, so one day he was on his turn on duty he escaped, during that week he hid under the body of murdered people due to he wanted to be killed by german soldiers, he got into a ship as a intruder but the crew allowed him to stay, my grandfather did know where the boat was going so he ended in Venezuela fortunatelly.
He didn't have either passport nor money, fortunately back then Venezuela had a good economic situation and there were many italian groups here, one of those accepted him and (he didn't even know spanish at that moment) he started working as a electrician. Years after he met my grandmother in colombia, they got married and that's how my family ended in this continent haha.
In 2012 (i think) my mom earned enough money to gift us a travel to Europe because we wanted to know if my family is still there, so we took advantage that my uncle was a detective so he did an investigation and he ended up discovering that yeah our family is there but they don't know about our existence, they didn't even know what happened to my grandfather.
We started our trip to Europe, we went to Frankfurt, Germany and then Paris, France (we stayed there during the week of december 31th, it was awesome), after that we did a road trip from France to Italy we went to Milan, Rome and then we decided to visit the town where our family are supposed to live, we went there and is the typical town in a mountain, super beautiful, when we arrived there we asked for the family "Di Meo" and fortunately in those kind of places everyone knows everyone so the french old man told us about a place where maybe our family was, going there we saw a 40ish man walking down the street, he seemed tired, he was going home after playing football, so we asked him in english: "hello, do you know where does family di meo live?"
He was impressed maybe confused and he said: "I'm di meo"
and we were like:"wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooot
:danc e:
"
We told him: "We are your family who lives in latin america, Panfilo (was the name of my grandfather) survived! my mom is his daughter!"
He was even more confused and he invited us to his house, then he asked us to go to the basement because there is someone special who can corroborate our story, we went there and we found panfilo's brother, we showed him our album of photo where there were photos with Panfilo and us, he shouted out loud! and then they hugged us! it was an epic moment, maybe the best moment of my life.
After that hug they started to call every familiar and we got together at a family pizza shop (yes they had a pizza shop lol) and we told them what happened with panfilo! I even met 2 cousins there, i had a hard time trying to communicate with them haha.
Nowadays we receive some updates about them on emails, i'm happy that they're okay, hopefully we can visit them again
the end.
I hope you guys like it!