We left Houston early Thursday morning, heading to Newark to board our connecting flight. My girlfriend got the tickets and we boarded quickly, without me really paying attention. We talked for a good ten minutes before I realized I wasn’t in first class. You should have seen my face fall when it occurred to me that I was going to be stuck in this little seat for four hours. I felt like such an idiot, and we had a good laugh over it. Suddenly, a gate agent appeared next to us, handed us upgraded tickets for First Class, and we moved our stuff up to the land of leather seats and good food.
After a long layover in Newark, we flew coach overnight from Newark to Rome, and it felt like it took about five minutes short of forever. I’m six feet three inches tall: folding myself into a coach seat is bad enough, but trying to sleep in one is simply not gonna happen. I flipped around for quite a while, but didn’t get much more than an hour or two of sleep. My girlfriend’s much shorter, so it was easier for her to get some rest.
When we touched down in Rome Friday morning, I felt very confident that we could get to the hotel in no time. The hotel service had e-mailed us specific directions, including the bus number and bus stop. We hopped on the express train from the airport to the bus station, and things looked good.
They stopped looking so good when we tried to find the bus stop. The Italian transportation system isn’t 100% reliable, because the drivers go on strike from time to time. One of those times happened to be when we got off the train. The strikers were blocking the bus stop to disrupt the daily travel routine, and no buses could get in or out. They don’t cover this sort of thing in the phrase books, let me tell you. After half an hour, we figured out that the buses were being diverted to a bus stop nearby. We started walking over to it - and the rain started coming down.
We waited at this other stop, keeping company with a wonderfully sweet old Italian woman (and a whole crowd of other people) who informed us that she was also waiting for the same bus - and she’d been waiting a while. After an hour of waiting, our bus (#310) magically appeared, and we hopped on.
We rode the bus for about another hour, waiting patiently for it to get to our stop (the last one on the line, of course), per the e-mail instructions. We hopped out and didn’t see the hotel, or the street it was supposed to be on, so we made our way to a pay phone and called. Turned out the e-mail directions gave the wrong bus stop, so we had to board the bus again and head back towards downtown. I kept saying how I was going to curse out the hotel staff when we finally arrived.
Around one or two o’clock local time, after 30+ hours of travel, we found the building. It was an apartment building. This guy was running a bed & breakfast out of his apartment. You could have knocked us over with a feather. Even worse, the place was a stone’s throw from a Metro stop - we could have skipped the whole bus process and saved ourselves three or four hours of trouble.
Anyway, the guy was extremely nice, and the apartment was better than a hotel room. The bedroom opened out onto a pretty little balcony with plants. At about 4pm, we hopped on the Metro, went down to the train station, and looked for some food. This was our first lesson in the oddities of Europe; in Rome, here’s the schedule:
- Shops are open from 9am to noon
- Restaurants are open from noon til 3pm
- Shops open again at 3pm until 7pm
- Restaurants are open again from 7pm til midnight
I’m not kidding - this is the way it is, and there’s no way around it. Coming from the States, this was a total shock, and I found out from an Italian later that it’s not something all of them enjoy, either. It’s an incredible pain in the butt, and believe me when I say we really looked for exceptions. We had to settle for some pizza. We talked about taking a quick Metro ride down to the Colosseum, just to see it from outside, but we were both pooped.
We went to bed around six or seven PM, sore with jet lag, and didn’t wake up until morning.
