Eventually I had to say good bye to my friends from the Paris H3 666 Hash. For me it was a very sad good bye since I was off to another city where I, once again, had no plans and this time truly no contacts. But that only meant more adventure and another set of friends to be made.
I arrived in Rome via RyanAir around 10PM local. I had no idea where the airport was in relation to the city and even if I did, I had no idea where in the city I was going. Somehow I made my way outside the airport and on to a bus that was headed to the main subway terminal in the heart of Rome. No idea how I knew where the bus was going, but it was a bus that was going somewhere so I got on.
Now I was in the heart of Rome, it was around midnight and I still had no idea what I was doing. There were plenty of bums around though and the city was a lot dirtier than I imagined… So keeping with my usual mode of operations I started wandering with no particular destination but determined not to sleep on the streets.
Around 3AM sleeping on the streets started to become a reality. Things weren’t going well for me at this point and I had a decision to make, sleep in a corner clutching my bag with my ninja grip or walk until sunrise and find a hostel. The decision was made to continue walking until sunrise and continue looking for a hotel in the meantime.
It was around 4AM that I saw a man in the doorway of a hotel. I walked up to the door and he opened it. I spoke what little Italian I could mutter, again from high school, and managed to talk him into allowing me to stay one night. Since I was alone he didn’t want one person taking up a double room, which made sense.
The next morning I started hunting for a new place to live. I tracked a group of English speakers, I think they were actually Canadians, to a hostel about 5 blocks from the hotel I stayed at the night before. The place was very nice compared to the other hostels I had seen and the number of people reflected that. I finally got up to the counter to find that they didn’t have any beds available at the time and directed me to another hostel down the road.
At the other hostel I managed to secure a bed but wasn’t able to go in because they were cleaning, a good sign I thought, so I left my backpack in a locked closet until the room became available. It made me a bit nervous at first but while I was waiting I got to talking to a couple of guys from South America, who were also staying and also had their things locked in the closet.
Since I was alone the guys told me I could go tour around with them. Miguel was from Buenos Aires, Argentina and Juan was from San Paulo, Brazil. Once again, I had managed to survive one night alone in a foreign city to be rewarded with some new friends for my self-induced troubles. After getting checked in we grabbed an archaic map of the city that sat at the front desk of the hostel and hit the streets.
Miguel was an economics guy who was working for a company in Argentina and it’s been so long I’ve forgotten what Juan did. Both of them were very friendly and only spoke English around me, even when speaking to each other. Unfortunately they didn’t speak Spanish, so I couldn’t even begin to understand their language if they spoke it. They even took me to Vatican City, even though they’d gone earlier in the day. We toured as much as we could before it was time to go back to the hostel to get our stuff and put it into the rooms.
My room had more cultures than the UN. There was an Aussie, who’d been on holiday for nearly 8 months, an Italian-American girl with her French boyfriend, and another lone traveler from Argentina. Carlina, the Argentine, was in Rome for a few days before going to Spain to spend the following few months with family. Since she was alone and I was hanging out with others from South America I asked her if she wanted to come around with us and she accepted. So I spent the remainder of the trip with my new group of South American friends.
Finally my time in Europe was about to come to an end. I was flying back to Frankfurt for a day, then back to the US the following day. Once again I said goodbye to my newfound friends and left behind the greatest, well, only European adventure I have had. I had lucked my way safely out of Germany, I had made my way out of Paris and Rome by making new friends and now I was back on my own for a day before getting back to the comforts of my own home.
In hindsight I’m really happy that I didn’t make any plans. I forced myself into situations where I had to meet new people and do things regular tourists don’t do. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it didn’t matter, I had to figure it out either way and making it more difficult was a good experience. Life can be easy but why make it so when it’s more fun the other way.
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