Be Careful What You Wish For...It’s a good thing I came here looking for adventure or I might not be enjoying myself quite so much. (On that note, be careful what you wish for…)
I just started a master’s degree program in Creative Writing. It’s all on-line except for two weeks twice a year when we gather in person with our professors and other students for some intensive study. This year they offered the option of doing that in-person stint in Rome. Student loan money would help cover the costs, so I jumped at the chance. I mean, I don’t speak Italian or anything, but who wants to pass up the chance to go to Rome when it comes their way? Two weeks before leaving I went to my filing cabinet to look for my passport and discovered it had expired two years ago. I was sure I’d JUST renewed it. I remembered that I had lost my old passport and had to send in for a new one. But my sense of time is often screwy, so maybe that was ten years ago. I spent a couple of frantic days calling around and finally figured out what I had to do: The normal passport renewals are taking up to six months right now. But some offices in some cities offer last minute appointments for emergencies like mine. You have to be within 72 hours of your travel date, but you can walk out of there with the passport that day. None in Montana, but there was one such office in Minneapolis, so I changed my flight to go through Minneapolis, with an eight hour layover. I left the house at 3am that morning and arrived at the airport at 4am for a 6am flight. They told me I couldn’t get on the plane. It didn’t matter that I was about to get my passport. They had to check me in all the way through to Rome and they couldn’t do that with an expired passport. An hour of phone calls later they finally came up with the option that I could rebook as two different trips but that would cost an extra $2500 (twice as much as the flight cost in the first place). Not an option. I fought with them another half hour before they finally offered to change my ticket for free. I was on the flight. With the heart problems I have been having lately, walking any distance is hard for me, so I am in the habit of ordering wheelchairs in airports. That worked for most of the airports, but I was still often shaky and gasping for breath by the time I got somewhere. I was also sick. I had taken a Covid test the night before, so I knew it wasn’t that, but I had been getting increasingly sick for the past few days. I know my body and when I feel like this it is most often bronchitis or pneumonia. By the end of my flight to Minneapolis, I was having trouble breathing. I found an urgent care clinic near the passport building and called an Uber. The doctor there was wonderful. Yes, I had bronchitis. Yes, if things were normal they wouldn’t be giving me antibiotics quite yet, but given my trip to Rome she gave me antibiotics, an inhaler and a med to help clear the gunk out of my lungs. Luggage in tow, I took another Uber to my passport appointment. I waited in lines, filled out forms and answered questions. The woman was very friendly, asking all about my ranch in Montana and the horses I raised. She sent my paperwork to the printer office and said I should stay nearby and wait for their phone call. An hour later it came. But it wasn’t good news. This was not my most recent passport. This was the one I had lost two years ago. Somewhere at home I had a valid passport which was needed for this trip. That could have been it right there. But the woman took a deep breath and said, “We are going to make this work. We will get you on that flight to Rome. Just come back and fill in more paperwork. We will say you lost your new passport (the one at home) and you will get another one today.” By now it would normally have been too late in the day for them to still manage printing a passport but over the next hour a number of them stayed late and made it happen. Whatever the reputation of government burrocrattes, the people in that office were lifesavers. An hour before my flight was suppose to leave, I stumbled down the stone steps of the Minneapolis Federal Building with my luggage behind me and called for an Uber. We rushed to the airport. I got there to find I needn’t have rushed – the plane had been hit by lightening and it was going to be four hours before they could get us a replacement. They ordered subs for the whole lot of us while we waited in the airport, and still served us a dinner of cheese ravioli when we boarded the plane at nine o’clock that night. The plane was going to Amsterdam, eight hours during which I dozed intermittently, and then I had a connecting flight to Rome. But because of the delay, I missed my connecting flight and had to be moved to a later flight. I spent a nice flight to Rome chatting with a Dutch woman in the seat next to me. We exchanged information and offers to stay if the other was ever in our area. Finally, I landed in Rome. My luggage didn’t. I spent two hours in line filing a report about lost luggage and was sent on my way. I paid an exorbitant fee ($37) to get out E100 of cash at an airport ATM and walked out of the airport. Immediately I was overwhelmed by noise and activity. There were hundreds of people standing around the door holding signs with names on them. My brain had shut down hours ago and I barely knew how to make sense of where I was. I read the instructions for meeting my hotel shuttle over and over and they still didn’t make sense. After an hour of wandering, I started stopping people to aske if they spoke English. Most just rushed on but one lady stopped and attempted to talk with me. Once I’d explained the situation she agreed to help me. But she could make no more sense of the directions I had than I could. She spent a good half hour calling the hotel (we couldn’t get through) and wandering with me around the airport, looking for a sign that would tell us where I was suppose to be. When we continued to get nowhere, I told her I would keep looking and went my way. I had no cell signal and could make no calls. Worse, my phone had no data connection and I couldn’t get the airport wifi to work so I had no way to look anything up or pull up google maps. At one point I just sat down on the sidewalk and stared around me. I had no idea how to continue to try and solve the problem before me. I’d been sitting there for a while when the woman walked up to me again. She had seen that I was still lost and was back on her phone, trying again to get through to my hotel for me. She motioned me to stand next to her and, finally getting through to a person, she began again to try and unravel my situation. Twenty minutes later she took me by the hand and led me to a (very hidden) sign with the name of my hotel on it. She told me to wait forty-five minutes for the shuttle that would pull up in that spot. I thanked her profusely and she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Welcome to Rome.” At my hotel it took me thirty minutes to find my room, which turned out to be in a separate building from the hotel and up an unmarked elevator. The next day I was to make my way to an Airbnb at which I would stay for the next two weeks, but the Airbnb hadn’t been available when for the first day of my trip, so I had booked this hotel for one night. I awoke the next morning to find I had laryngitis and had lost my voice. I couldn’t speak above a whisper. I used Google Translate to look up and write down (in my handy dandy little travel notebook) “I lost my voice,” “I don’t speak Italian,” and “Do you speak English?” all in Italian. Gripping this piece in sweaty hands, I started my first day in Italy. I took the shuttle back to the airport and spent two hours trying to find the Lost & Found office again. I stood in line for an hour and spent the next twenty minutes explaining why I was there. But – what do you know! – I was told that my bag was here and I could pick it up. That wasn’t as easy as it sounded and I had to cross the airport three times before the woman behind the desk left her desk, took me by the hand, and led me to an obscure back door with no signs and no attendants where my bag was sitting, waiting for me. Now I just had to get across Rome to my Airbnb. And that proved to be harder than all the rest of the trip combined. I had planned to take a bus. But I had not counted on 1) how much trouble I would have lugging my luggage around and doing all that walking and 2) how confusing it is to read bus signs and schedules when you don’t speak the language or know what streets are near your stop. I soon realized that even if I figured out how to get a ticket and got on a bus, I would have no idea where to get off. I decided I had to take a cab. This was not ideal. I knew Rome cab drivers have a reputation for cheating people, especially at the airport. And I had no idea how to find a cab, despite the frequent signs for “Taxi” all over the airport. I walked out the door into a throng of a hundred or more people, holding signs. Behind them was another throng of people in front of a Taxi sign, and a long line for the Taxis. But at the time I couldn’t tell the two throngs apart and didn’t realize there was a dedicated Taxi line. I was relieved when a person came up to me to ask me if I wanted a Taxi. I said yes and asked the price. They said 80Euros. I knew the price was suppose to be about 50Euros and said no. After being approached by three or four more people with the same price (I did not yet realize that the actual way to get a Taxi was to stand in the long line. The people approaching me on their own were private companies, unlicensed and looking for an easy mark – which I clearly was – a middle aged, confused, exhausted American woman who didn’t speak the language and was clearly lost…) I finally realized I needed to go back inside for an ATM because I had only 50Euros with me at this point and it was starting to look like that wouldn’t be enough, despite what the guide books said. One driver had offered to take me to an ATM on the way, but that didn’t seem at all safe to me. I decided I needed to go back to the ATM I had seen in the baggage claim area and pay the ridiculous rates to get more money out. Then I discovered that once you leave the building you are not allowed back into the airport at all. It took me ten minutes to talk them into letting me in so I could go to the ATM. I got out 200Euros and went back out to the Taxi area. A man approached, quoted me 75Euros and I accepted. He took my luggage and led me away from the airport. Quite a long ways away. We walked a long time. By the time we got there it was clear I had gotten one of those private taxi companies the guide books warned you about. They have no white Taxi sign on top of their cars and no meter inside. I decided I had to just go with it (I could barely stand or think by this time) and I put my luggage in the trunk and got in the car with the driver the first man led me to. The drive was fine aside from the fact that the driver spent much of it, zipping full speed down highways and through crowded streets with the index to his map open across his steering wheel, trying to find my street. Every now and then he would swerve too far into another lane, get honked at and jerk the car back. Periodically, he would purposely, without warning, yank the car into another lane, cutting off bikes, busses and other cars. I decided that this was the definition of a situation I had little control over and sat back to observe the big stone buildings and abundant flowering plants lining every street. In the end we arrived in one piece. He wrote me out a receipt and handed it to me. 175Euros. I argued with him. He became offended, loud and angry. He showed me a placard with prices listed on it and pointed to one line that said 180Euros. I argued some more. He said if I wanted my luggage out of his trunk I had to pay the 175Euros I owed him. I finally pulled out 4 fifty dollar bills and asked him for change. He dropped the money in his lap then picked it back up. “What is this?” he asked. “You cheat? You cheat me?” The money in his hand was two fifties and two tens. “I gave you four fifties,” I started, and the yelling began again, “You not! You try to cheat me! You give me two fifty and two ten!” The truth is I was not positive that he wasn’t right. I was so tired by then, I could have pulled out the wrong money. But I didn’t think so, Because all I had left at that point was one more fifty and if I’d given him two tens there should have been three fifties in my wallet. Eventually I took the two tens back and gave him the other fifty. He gave me by bags and left. I got into my Airbnb. I got settled. I slept. I slept some more. I double checked the price of taxies – it should have been only 50Euros. Oh well. What can I do about it now? I tried to let it go. I continued to try and let it go for the rest of the day. And most of the next. I explored my area, found a little Peruvian restaurant and had dinner. And I slept and slept and slept. (I planned my arrival two days early knowing I would need to sleep a lot to recover from the trip). Tomorrow the rest of my school group arrive and I will, hopefully, have a little back-up around. Or at least a few comrades in arms for me to commiserate with. The streets here are lined with cars and packed with people. Busses barrel down streets they can barley squeeze into and motorbikes ignore all lanes and zip around everyone at top speed. Bikes and scooters do the same. The streets are lined with huge, brick or stone buildings with dark wooden doors. Most are covered with verandas a dozen stories high and the verandas are all dripping with potted plants and flowers of every kind. Everyone is dressed in long sleeves and jackets except for me who finds 60-70 degrees to be quite pleasant and about perfect for shorts and sandals. There are little supermarkets here and there which are filled with colorful fresh fruits, fresh cheeses and beautiful breads. They sell loves by the half or quarter loaf so you can get just enough for one meal and not have to eat day old bread the next day. Tomorrow I find the hotel where my group is meeting and figure out how to get there – taxi or walk? Then on with the adventure.
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Christie GoodmanChristie is a 50 year old Author from Missoula Montana. She has an MFA in English and a bachelor's degree in Philosophy. She owns an off-grid horse ranch in the mountains of western Montana. She is an author of two books with a third on the way. Her first book will be published in December of 2024! Archives
October 2024
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