July 11th - Travel

So, bracing myself for a long day, I headed for the station. (And it was a long day, so if you don’t have time to read a lengthy entry then stop here.)

As mentioned before, needing to stay in Rome was annoying, even though I knew it was necessary in order to catch the train. Obviously the first thought was to get a hotel, but this was just too expensive (from what I could find that night, prices ran from about €80-130 a room), so I decided to stay the night in the airport. Taking the 10:00 train from Arezzo left me arriving in Rome at about 12:30. When the security guard kicked me out of the station at 1, I knew I would be in for a long night – since now I didn’t have anywhere to stay, and seemingly no way to get to the airport, I didn’t exactly want to try to sleep on the street in a sketchy part of the city with a violin, purse, and suitcase around me. So I settled outside the station sitting on my luggage, and tried to think of ways to occupy myself until 5 a.m., when the next train would run to the airport.

Soon an old Indian taxi driver approached, asking if I needed a ride. When I told him no, I had already bought a train ticket for the next morning, he snapped out of business mode for a minute to advise me against staying where I was for the night. “Take a bus,” he said, switching to weak English, “there are many people drink tonight, dangerous for you.” He helped me find the bus times across the street, and left me there to wait for a shuttle bus to the airport that ran at 2:30 a.m. Even though I had already bought a ticket, I trusted both my gut instinct and a helpful stranger’s warning words and took the bus. Two separate fees was a small price to pay to ensure safety for the night.

The bus ride was mostly uneventful, and I had reached the point where I was beginning to be tired, so I started to doze off while driving across town. Suddenly I started awake seeing something out of the corner of my eye, and turned out the window to see the giant form of the Colosseum looming over the bus. It was lit up for nighttime, and since the curvature of the road wrapped closely around its borders, I was able to fully take in the view while we followed it for a good minute or two. As I gawked at the enormous stone structure, I didn’t have enough wits about me to pull out my camera... but I think this makes it more mysterious and fascinating to me as I will remember only its monstrous size sneaking up on me in the middle of the night.

I reached Fiumicino at about 3:30 a.m., and the place was almost totally deserted. Or so I thought, until I walked up the stairs looking for someplace to rest: there in front of me were probably 50 people stretched out on the couches, wrapped in blankets, luggage in piles on the floor next to them, no one awake. It was quiet and a little bit eerie, almost like an airport graveyard. I settled down for a nap, but only slept an hour or so until the place’s energy picked up again as passengers began to arrive to catch early-morning flights.

Going down to the gate around 7 a.m., I met a white-haired couple on my flight who were returning to Virginia from their 50th wedding anniversary trip to Italy. On seeing the violin, the husband said they had five children, all musical, one of them a pastor and one a missionary in Romania. We kept together while waiting, and they thanked me for “watching over” them while changing gates, even though the only thing I had done was to check the flight itinerary for the change.

The violin has become quite a conversation piece for travel. The next gate I met another couple who had been eyeing the case for several minutes before the man spoke up, asking if it was a violin or a viola. He is the director of music at a school in Hartford, and on further conversation I learned that their son is a singer and former member of Chanticleer, an internationally-known singing group who visited Oberlin last year and of which I own several CDs. I plan to read more about him when I have time.

The flight was uneventful, but quite scenic. The plane followed the Italian coast for most of the way (pictured above), and below the clouds, so I snapped pictures while traveling over the famed Isle of Elba and the beautiful Alps.

And then came customs.

I was stopped at the border getting into England for about two hours, where the workers held me as the desk as a traveler “under inspection.” The woman I talked to, an irritated-looking person with her hair pulled back in a tight bun and shiny pink lipstick that looked terrible, was entirely convinced that I was planning on doing something fishy while in the country. The problems she saw included:

-Me not having an address for where I was staying (of course I don’t have an address, I’m staying with a friend of my friend and my friend is the one taking me there)

-My friend being an American girl working with a family in England (this is probably the most legitimate, seeing as American nannies are illegal in this country without a visa, and the border control is wary… however, this is not the case with Emilie), and

-My “limited” cash supply (I told her I had 50 euro on my person and a couple thousand American dollars in credit).

To top things off, she decided to search every bit of my luggage. When she found my journal, she deliberately read as much of it as she could in the space of five minutes, and found one unfortunate sentence in my writing: “Now I don’t want to go to England.” The funny part of this (and what I explained to her, but in vain) is that if she had read the context, she would have seen that the implication was not that I didn’t want to go to England, but that I didn’t want to leave Italy. After two hours of interrogation, searching through my belongings, and making phone calls to the States, she pursed her bright pink lips up into a fake smile and reluctantly let me through. “But if I were you, I would strongly advise your nanny friend,” she added.

After nearly 24 straight hours of travel, Emilie finally picked me up, and I arrived at the house in Alton, about an hour south of London.

To be continued,
-Allie