Rome has never been the luckiest travel destination for me. On my first trip, at age 19 or 20 (I forget), my entire purse was stolen and I spent a day at the U.S. Consulate getting all my important documents replaced. Four years later, older and wiser (so I thought), I travelled with a theft-proof bag full of zippered compartments, a buckled safety flap on the front and a strap that couldn't be cut with a knife by passing motorcycle thieves. I was smug in my invincibility. Too smug, as it turned out. A couple days later I was robbed again on a crowded metro by an ingenious couple of thieves, one of whom distracted me with a smelly armpit in my face while the other deftly outmaneuvered all those tricky thief-proof obstacles and stole my wallet. But this time, I had gotten through the entire trip without a single accident. Triumph was mine! I had beaten the Italian curse!.....Hmm. It just wasn't meant to be.
Rome itself was great! I got WAY too little sleep, drank more than was good for me, learned a ton that I didn't know before, and spent the days fighting off sleep and hangovers and bouncing from foot to broken foot. On the train ride to the airport, I was thinking about how nice it was to have had such a problem-free vacation in Rome. When we reached our terminal, our class gathered around a table at a cafe, drank cute little mini-bottles of terrible wine, had our conclusive discussion of the term then made our way slightly tipsily to the check-in and security screening area. This is when Murphy's law came into effect, because everything that could go wrong did.
It all started with the little metal luggage measurer (the thing you have to put your luggage into to make sure it will fit into the overhead compartment). In all other airports, my bag has easily fit. So of course this time it didn't, and there was a member of staff there guarding the entrance to security and turning back those of us with "oversized" luggage. I made my way over to the baggage check-in line and told the others to go ahead. At the counter, a lady took my ticket, typed on her computer, looked puzzled, typed again, shook her head, and gave my ticket back, telling me that I had the wrong date. My flight didn't leave until tomorrow night. And my stomach plummeted.
I've figured out how it happened, although the explanation doesn't make it sound any less stupid. I was originally planning a much longer trip to see parts of Italy I hadn't seen before. I later decided against it, because I would miss my entire last week of classes. But I was originally going to leave Rome on Tuesday. Apparently this was the date that I had stuck in my mind when I made the tickets. Apparently, I didn't re-check things after my ticket was made. Funny thing is, I had the nagging suspicion all day that something was wrong with my ticket. I kept feeling like I had made it for the wrong time. In fact, before we got on the train I had borrowed someone else's ticket to check. Fiumicino to Gatwick, flight departs 21:20- sigh. All was fine. I never thought about checking the date.
So I called the group ahead of me, and Valentina (our professor) had the idea that I could switch tickets with another member of our class who hadn't been able to make the trip. I was skeptical, but I made my way over to the ticket counter and told my story to the woman at the desk. This woman either hated her job very much or just, in general, hated all other people. She took my tickets with great theatrical sighs and eye-rolling, abused her keyboard for a few seconds, complaining all the while that they were about to close in ten minutes and she didn't have time for these things and this was not her problem. When she was done with this tirade, she handed my tickets back and told me there was nothing she could do. I could change my own tickets, but not without paying a 200 euro fee. So it looked like I was staying in Italy for another night.
This is the sort of time when good technology comes in handy. Like an iPhone with internet, perhaps (I'll take this time to say that I hate Steve Jobs and would very much like to punch him in the face). Instead, I had a piece-of-shit, pay-as-you-go phone with no internet capabilities. Valentina gave me the number of an archaeologist we had met in Rome who had been a part of our class for the last few days and we began to sort out some form of accommodation for the night. Between the two of us, we began calling hostels. Finally, Anna found one that was available and gave me the number...and this is when my phone stopped being able to make international phone calls. And neither could hers. So here I was at 10:00 at night, in a foreign country, with no place to stay, 30 minutes away from Rome, and with no means of communication. I had the number of a place where I could stay, but not the address.
My first thought was to beg the belligerent lady at the ticket counter for help of some sort, so I did this, was verbally abused again and told to go to a travel agency in Terminal B. I really thought that I would be massively ripped off at this place, but without any other options, exhausted and at my threshold of stress tolerance I decided to give it a try. Fortunately, they found me a place at a B&B in Fiumicino for only 44 Euro including transportation to and from the airport, which didn't sound too bad to me. Life was good again.
The Bed and Breakfast was in the house of an adorable Italian couple who didn't speak any English at all. We communicated mostly through hand gestures and a combination of my almost non-existant Spanish and Italian, and whatever words of English they knew. The place seemed absolutely perfect, an idyllic little Italian house with rock floors, high ceilings, wooden shuttered windows and and a big fluffy bed piled with blankets. Within ten minutes, I fell into a deep coma and woke up just in time for breakfast. During breakfast, I was given a post-it note in the sort of English that read like it was translated from Italian with a very bad internet translating site. It told me (I think), that I would need to be out of the house at 9:30 and could not return until 4:00, when one of them would drive me to the airport.
So I found myself at 9:30 am on the streets of Fiumicino, which I knew nothing at all about, without a map, and with no idea what to do or which direction to go. I didn't feel that I could wander very far without losing my sense of direction, and if I couldn't find my way back to the B&B, I would definitely be screwed. But I felt sure that I would find a square or a park or some public place to sit and rest and read a book or something. Instead, what I found was street after street of buildings covered in graffiti, streets lined with trash, small, stand-up cafes with no seating, and lots of thrift stores. And almost immediately I ran into a group of youngish Italian men standing in a group outside a cafe who began to heckle me as I passed and followed me down the street for a while yelling suggestive-sounding things at me. This definitely didn't improve my morale. But I was the only very obviously non-Italian there, so that probably made me a target for their entertainment.
You would imagine that since it is so close to the airport, Fiumicino would see it's share of tourists, but the people in the area I was in seemed taken aback to see a tourist walking around, and definitely didn't seem very friendly to foreigners. Perhaps it was just that particular neighborhood. Everywhere I went I was stared at with quizzical or hostile looks that seemed to ask me what the hell I was doing there. My combination Italian and Spanish didn't work at all here and seemed to frustrate people. I felt very much like a leper or an unusual species of bug. It was not a very comfortable place to spend a day, to say the least, and it seemed that I would spend it walking around in desperation, unsuccessfully trying to find some place to settle for a while or sit down.
After a couple hours of this as I was beginning to think that this would be just about the worst day ever, I came across the harbor and the beach of Fiumicino. The beach itself was dirty, littered with trash, and completely abandoned, but there was a pier nearby where the ships sailed in and out of the harbor. All along this pier, men were fishing, couples were going for a walk and pushing babies in strollers. The water was very blue and crashed against the rocks of the pier, and you could see for a long distance up the beach to the mountains in the distance. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, so I sat on the pier most of that day, reading, listening to the waves and the seagulls, watching the ships come in and out and and the fishermen mostly not catch fish, and becoming increasingly sunburned. It turned into a great day- really, very peaceful, and I was glad I ended up there... But I'm also very glad to be home.
