"Play Freebird!"

When I arrived on the plane in Rome, it was morning. It felt good to be back on foreign soil again, surrounded by people speaking a beautiful if imperceptible language. It’s high time I had a new adventure.
Took the train into Termini (the main train station in downtown Rome) and when I arrived, I made my way down to the ticket counter and purchased a ticket on the next train to Florence.

Try as I might, I had the hardest time navigating the train platforms. Not to mention I was dragging about 50 lbs of crap around with me, and I was getting thirsty. First I had to figure out how to get to the train platforms.

Rome is a big city, Termini a big station, everything is clearly labeled – even in English sometimes. However, and maybe this was somehow my user error, I found myself following a bunch of signs and arrows supposedly guiding me to train platforms, that in reality eventually just dead-ended at entrances to train platforms that were closed and under construction. Sweet. Ok. I’ll turn around and go back where I started.
To make a long story short, I walked around for an hour, got thirstier, and more annoyed, until my shoulders started hurting from the luggage. Eventually I found myself on what I thought was platform nine, where my ticket said the train would be leaving from in 15 minutes.
I sat there for awhile on my bag, waiting. Alone.
It was kind of curious to me that I seemed to be the only person in all of Rome that needed to go to Florence, Bologna, or Milan (three of Italy’s largest cities) on a week day at 11am. I should mention also that there was no train on this alleged platform nine. In fact, there weren’t any workers either – not for maybe one-hundred feet in any given direction.

It’s funny how when you find yourself in an unfamiliar environment, you sometimes manage to convince yourself that maybe everybody else just knows something you don’t. Like maybe at 5 minutes before departure, the train is just going to come flying in, 500 people are going to show up and dive in the doors without heavy bags or children or anyone checking their tickets and it’s going to go down like clockwork. Yes that must be the case, especially since NOTHING happens on time or follows a schedule in Italy and EVERYTHING seems to take considerably more time than it should. But it says platform 9 on my ticket, and it says platform 9 on the wall, and my bag is really comfortable to sit on after walking all that time. I must be in the right place. Never mind all of this overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The train must be coming right to me because God couldn’t possibly want me to inconvenience me anymore today…

I got curious and walked over to look at the timetable on the wall. It listed the departing platform for my train to Florence as 12. I looked over at platform 12. There was a train. There were people getting on it. There were uniformed men stamping tickets. I looked at the clock – 2 minutes to departure. I looked back at my bag, and my purse, and my guitar, all alone on the desolate platform nine. A tumble weed blew by.

I took a deep breath and started running. I threw my bags on my shoulders and ran like a foolish amateur in a faraway land who was late for a very expensive train.

When I arrived at the platform, sweating, panting, unable to swallow due to a mounting dehydration, I showed my ticket to a station worker. He indicated that I was in the right place, quickly grabbed two of my bags and showed me to my seat. He even insisted on putting the bags up on the racks above the chairs for me.
‘What a nice guy!’ I thought. Then he turned around and with a big ole grin, stuck out his hand and promptly demanded a tip. Damn gypsy. I looked him up and down to check and see if he was even wearing a uniform. (He was.)

Reluctantly, I pulled out a one-Euro coin. As I began to present it to him, he wagged a finger at me and said “No, no. Ten Euros.” I choked a little as I began to laugh, then didn’t even look at him as I, channeling my father, put the one euro coin back into my wallet, and put my wallet back into my bag. “Keep dreaming, buddy” I said, knowing full well he had no idea what I said, but understood exactly what I meant.
Suddenly the coin was looking pretty spiffy to him, and he let me know.
‘Oh yea sure, now you want it, don’t you?’ I glared at him and handed him the coin. He left, satisfied. Asshole.

Turns out, the jackass robbed me of more than my one Euro coin. I found out 30 miles down the line that he’d helped carry my bags onto the wrong train going south toward Naples, not north to Florence. Thus, 2 hours after departing Rome, I was back at square one. Sitting on my bags in the Termini station, waiting on a train now without even a valid ticket. I cursed the fates. I cursed the language barrier, I cursed the ancient city and it’s impoverished train station employee who hadn’t bothered to look at my ticket’s Destination city as he plotted to rob me of my overpriced, newly exchanged currency. I needed a moment.

I bought an expensive bottle of water, found a corner to crumple into and disappear for a while in plain sight. I pulled out my guitar and strummed a bit. I started to play ‘Ain’t no sunshine,’ quietly. As I realized nobody was really paying attention, I started playing louder and singing. It was a nice release and I didn’t seem to be bothering anyone. I kept singing, and I closed my eyes for a bit. I started to feel better.

When I opened them again, there was a security guard standing in front of me, leaning over, waiting patiently in my line of sight for me to see him. He wagged one finger left and right, in the rude way Italians like to do “No is OK. No is OK.” I was mid-song, mid-verse, mid-line. I made that slow-down noise that record players make when you turn them off instead of picking up the needle to stop the sound. I looked up at him, defeated.
‘Grazie!” He chirped.
You’re welcome, Barney Fife. Don’t you get paid to do something other than destroy the tasteful ambiance that Bill Withers and I were just working so hard to create? Whatever. He looked kind of like the Italian equivalent of a Kid Rock fan, anyway. Like the type of guy who- if this were Texas and say, Ryan Adams happened to be playing a surprise show at some obscure dive bar in Fort Worth- would stumble out of the bathroom during the closing lines of ‘Come Pick Me Up’, and drunkenly, obnoxiously request some Skynard while waving his Budlight lime in the air, none-the-wiser to his own woeful inappropriateness.

I put away my guitar, folded my arms, and leaned back against the wall, waiting for Providence to deliver unto me the divine scheme that would get me to Florence on an invalid train ticket and good old-fashioned wishful thinking.

Amanda and Zeno's backyard - BBQ!


Shoulda put a honey in the middle. Oh well, guess that's just how they do things in Europe.


This is what florence looks like outside the train station


View out the window


Me on the plane.

Well it’s been about a week, so I suppose that constitutes an update. Despite the fact that I flew on standby, everything went incredibly smooth on my initial journey to Rome. Planes were on time, I was on time, there was a seat for me by the window.
I had a layover in Chicago, and they were in the heart of a serious heatwave. I trekked across town via bus and train all the way to Nikki’s place. When I arrived, it was midnight and her apartment was something akin to an oven. The southerner in me asked if the AC was broken, and the Northerner in her politely reminded me about places where summer doesn’t warrant air conditioning because it isn’t 109 degrees for 2 solid months. People really shouldn’t live in Texas during July and August.
Thankfully Nikki had bought and outfitted her own room with an AC unit, making it a sort of desert oasis in which one could actually sleep…
We stayed up for a couple hours, girl-talking. You know the drill. Then we passed out around 2 and she left for work about 6am. My flight to Rome was at 5pm, which meant I needed to be at the airport around 1pm and it took about an hour to get to the airport. I thought about getting out of bed, perhaps venturing out in search of a fine slice of Chicago’s finest ‘za, but in the end, opted for 10 hours of straight snoozing, punctuated by a long cold shower.
Made it back to the airport on time, got a nice seat in coach next to the window. It was long. Boring. Accentuated by such mediocre cinematic selections as “The Adjustment Bureau” and “Ramona and Beazus.” I didn’t sleep.

8 hours later I was in Rome. It felt good to be on foreign soil again.
[Little did I know, I was about to be reminded in a big way how much Italian I had forgotten and never knew in the first place, and how problematic that can be when you’re trying to get around by yourself. But that’s a story for another day.]

I arrived in Florence (a 2 hour transit from the Rome airport) nearly 8 hours later.
I waited on the steps of Amanda’s flat for about 15 minutes until Zeno and his mother arrived and let me in. We greeted each other with cheek kisses and ‘hellos’.
Zeno had to run, so his mother – who is Albanian and speaks very little Italian and no English – and I tried to get to know each other until Amanda and Zeno returned. You’d think that would be impossible, but you’d be wrong. She’s an incredibly warm and genuine person, so she gave me some water, indicated that I should make myself comfortable and then there were a lot of hand gestures and facial expressions. And a good deal of giggles…