My cousin Dimitri graduated in 2008 from New York University. As a celebration, he and I went on a tour of Europe that Summer, visiting Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague, Rome, Sparta, and Athens over the course of five weeks. The trip is definitely something that has remained with me in my memory, and something we constantly make references to in our conversations and jokes.
One of the most memorable cities was Rome.
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Not to distract from our main story, but I have been to Italy once before. In 2005 I went to visit some extended family in Mola di Bari, a small town in Southern Italy. During my time there I met a kid named Nicky who was originally from South Carolina, but had moved to Mola at age five(ish).
Nicky and I became friends almost immediately – we were both excited to hear someone speaking English. However it wasn’t until I fixed his Playstation 2 that we became full-out comrades.
When Dimitri and I were planning the trip and decided to visit Italy, I gave Nicky a call to let him know the dates and to see if he could meet us. To our surprise he mentioned that he had just gotten a place in Rome and offered us a place to stay! We eagerly accepted – money was already going to be a problem, and a case of beer is much cheaper than room and board.
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It was week three of our trip, and we’d already seen Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, and Munich. We had recently left Venice and were almost in Rome. Our Eurail train debarked at about 10PM local time, and immediately I called Nicky.
“Hey man, we’re in town; we just got off the Eurail!”
“Awesome, ok you need to take the subway to [some stop]. Call me when you get there.”
“Sure thing, see you soon!”
We took the subway to [some stop]. It wasn’t very long, maybe 20 minutes. As we got out of the station, I called Nicky again to let him know where we were. He didn’t answer.
For almost two hours.
There we were, luggage in tow, sitting on the steps of a random train station in a random city on the outskirts of Rome. Looking around, we quickly noticed that it wasn’t the best of neighborhoods: dirty streets, skelly-looking people, few lights. Our only option was really to wait it out.
Suddenly at 11:30, Nicky calls.
“Dude I’m so sorry, I left my phone in the car.”
“It’s fine, whatever, where are you?”
“Well, now you have to take a train to [some other stop].”
“Wha..? What do you mean?”
“Just go to the train station and take it to [some other stop].”
“Nicky, the train station closed 45 minutes ago. How are we going to get there?”
After some bickering, we decided just to take a cab. Unfortunately, the cab fare to this particular destination was 40 euro. We weren’t very happy about it, but at this point our options were either to blow 40 euro, or to spend the night on the subway steps. It was an easy decision.
We got dropped off 25 minutes away on a dimly-lit street in front of a closed-down post office. After midnight. In Rome. With our all of luggage.
Fifteen minutes later, Nicky picks us up in a car. Now, you have to remember where we are; by “car” I mean one of those tiny FIAT rides that look like they could fit two and a half normal-sized people (or seventeen clowns). We then drive another fifteen minutes to his apartment.
Let me tell you, dear reader, that even after this long and terrible wait, my cousin and I are still ready to go out, party, and be assaulted by hundreds of beautiful Italian women. When we reached Nicky’s apartment, however, we were disappointed by the fact that there was absolutely zero chance of ever getting a decent young lady to come back to this place. Let’s step into the shoes of a visitor to this extremely humble abode.
The first red flag would have been the communal bathroom and kitchen for the floor. Actually, back up: the first red flag is step one into the building, where we are immediately told by Nicky to be extremely quiet so as not to wake anyone. No talking, no humming, no loud walking, no loud breathing.
Enter Nicky’s room (the apartment only had one). See complete disarray. Gaze for a spot to put your belongings for a moment until being told, “Oh, just move some things around; don’t worry about it.” Wonder how you will ever get a decent night’s sleep on top of three couch cushions, using your jacket as a pillow.
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In the morning, we get up at around 7AM. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s all the time we had to sightsee, so we needed to get an early start. I suppose it worked out that this also happened to be the time Nicky had to wake up for work.
The route to the city is actually a bus, then a train, then the subway, resulting in about an hour’s worth of travel. We board the bus, and ask Nicky if we need tickets. A chuckle and a “No” were the answer.
Then we watched in horror as the bus made its second stop and the ticket police boarded.
Dimitri and I look at each other with a wide-eyed “oh snap” kind of look, and then at Nicky with a “what the hell are we supposed to do now?” kind of look. Nicky says, “It’s ok, I got this.”
He proceeds to pretend to be an American tourist playing dumb. Let me remind you, dear reader, that Nicky has been living in Italy for the better part of his life and is a fluent speaker of Italian. This was possibly the worst idea ever.
After some back and forth, they lay it out to us simply: either we pay 50 euro each, we go to the police office and pay 100 euro, or we ditch the ticket, having a bill sent to our embassy for 220 euro. That pretty much made the decision for us.
This trip had already cost us 150 euro, not including the phone bill for the night before. Thoroughly annoyed and relatively broke, Dimitri and I parted from Nicky and took to the city.
***
Rome is a gorgeous city. Although running around doing everything in one day was less than ideal, we still managed to appreciate everything and take a lot of great pictures. It’s definitely a city that you have to experience for yourself, if for nothing else than to see School of Athens and the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican.
With blistered feet and sore backs, we ran around the ancient cobbled streets in flip flops through the Vatican and Sistine Chapel, from the Pantheon to the Trevi Fountain, from the Spanish Steps to the Colosseum.
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Later that night, we made a plan to meet back up with Nicky so that he could introduce us to some beautiful Italian women. We met him at a bus stop in the city. The three of us sat around waiting for Nicky’s friend to pick us up. Apparently he had some sort of plan, but none of us really knew what it was. None of us, including him, it seemed.
An hour later we crammed into another one of those Italian clown-cars and drove for 30 minutes. Dimitri and I had no idea what was going on. It was at this point that we discovered that our destination was the beach! We were a bit confused, though, as it was 10 PM and we were not in beach wear by any means. The Italians told us not to worry. Feeling annoyed and, much worse, completely out of control, Dimitri and I looked at each other with a look that said “How much worse could it possibly get?”
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The next thing we knew, we saw green lights hovering in the clouds: huge, looming green lights in the sky, emanating from some big structure.
After parking, we found the source: un concerto sulla spiagia – a reggae beach concert!
Our Roman adventure suddenly took a sharp turn from frustrating and chaotic into happy and enjoyable. We were amazed and completely forgot about all the trials of the day and just enjoyed ourselves. Beer and wine and street food and lots of beautiful Italian women; how could it get better than this?
Even looking back on the entire five-week trip through nine different cities and eight different countries (not including the stops in between), this is one of my most treasured memories. I think it’s the feeling that we really just earned it; like all the discord throughout the day was just a precursor to make the icing on the cake taste that much better.
There’s a moral here somewhere, although I think I’ll have to stretch to find it. Maybe it’s that if ever you go to a strange city and your friend offers you a place to stay, make sure he isn’t just talking.