Rome: Part IV

This is the final installment in the Rome saga. I'm sorry it took so long to get it up, but it took me a long time to write. You will see as you read on. Enjoy!

First of all, I must preface this blog post with a portion of an email I received yesterday:

...

Dear jj, Julie, and Katie,

Congratulations on winning OfficeTally's 'Hope Grows in a Dump' Haiku Contest! http://www.officetally.com/hope-grows-in-a-dump-haiku-contest

Please email me your full name and shipping address, and I will get The Office 2010 Calendar out to you.

:) Jennie

...


Hooray!!!!!!! Due in a huge part to your dedicated voting, I am one of three winners of a 2010 Office calendar! If there was a way I could split the calendar up into pieces, one for every vote that you so loyally cast, I totally would. Then I could share with you the sweetness of haiku victory. Sadly, this cannot be the case because the calendar is currently on its way to my home in Seattle, and I will not be united with it until June when half the calendar will have lost its usefulness. But, I can still say now that I won an Office haiku contest, and THE reason is you, readers! So thank you, thank you, thank you!

To honor the other winners of the contest, I thought you might be interested in reading the two haikus that also won their authors a 2010 calendar (might they also have blog audiences they can rally? Who knows?). These two are also fine pieces of work:

jj:
A first kiss followed,
By a Ra-di-di-di-do,
Hope grows in a dump.

Julie:
With trash collecting
Two were sweetly connecting
Hope grows in a dump

Three cheers for haikus!

Now on to the final installment in the Rome saga.

Rome: Part IV

or, How "Can we stay longer?" turned into "Can we get out of here?"

Although the switching on of European daylight saving time meant that we went to bed at 2AM, Anna and I were convinced that the walk to the train station to go to the airport was not going to be our only image of Rome on our last day. So, at 6AM we were up and walking the quiet streets of Rome that lead to the Colosseum.

And we watched the sun come up over a monument that we had completely to ourselves.

























































Favorite moment: standing outside the gates and looking in to the completely empty arena. When the place normally looks like this during the day,



















seeing it empty was pretty cool.

We also got to see a few other places in the early-morning light on our was down:







































And that, I think, was a fitting goodbye to Rome.

Oh, and Anna and I got whistled at several times on the walk back. Once by the garbage man, too! I mean, come on! The garbage man? I guess that's what we get for being the only people walking down the street...

Anyway, now it was time to HEAD TO THE AIRPORT

This is where the...fun began.

We made it to the train station on time. We also bought tickets smoothly, found our train with no problems, and took the good ol' Leonardo Express to Fiumicino airport without a hitch.

Then we got off the train.

First, let me preface this story with another story. Last year three friends and I got tear-gassed in Paris. You have maybe heard this story before, since I tend to tell it quite often. But the thing with that story is, we didn't do anything wrong. We were in a Metro station that just happened to be right next to an ongoing riot, and when the tear gas from the riot drifted down into the tunnels of the Metro, we linked arms and ran out. Then we got away. Pretty good story, but because we did exactly the right thing in that situation.

Now, back to the train station at the airport, and our run-in with the Italian police. Excuse me -- the railway police. They were very proud of that fact.

And this story, my friends, is in some ways much the same as my tear gas story, and in some ways very different. You shall see.

So Nick, Adam, and I were walking up the platform. Matteo, Eric, and Anna were a ways ahead. I have just started thinking about the Coca Cola I'm going to buy once I get past security, when we are stopped by the railway police.

Time for some more handy tips, now, folks:

Handy tip #1

Do not trust Wikitravel as your main source of scam information, because Wikitravel does not sometimes pay attention to cultural nuances. IMPORTANT cultural nuances.

Handy tip #2

When the railway police ask for your passport, take a moment to examine their uniforms, name tags, and --excuse me -- GUNS before suspecting (accusing?) them of not being real police

Yeah. This is a fun story, right? I am trying to do it justice.

So they ask the three of us for our passports. Adam tells them that his passport is in his brother's bag (who is now WAAAAAY ahead of us. Great), and he runs ahead.

Nick and I are left behind and begin getting our passports out.

It is at THIS moment that I remember something I read on Wikitravel, that sometimes in Italy people will come up to you, posing as police, then ask for your passport and run away. Wikitravel advised me to ask the police if I could see their badge, or something. Scam police would be scared away by this, and real police would be happy to verify their authenticity and move on with the check.

Actually, I'm not sure if Wikitravel used the phrase "be happy." This might be something that I, the American who was taught that the police are heroes, my friends, the good guys, etc., read into this...

Cultural differences, guys...

So, Nick gives them his passport (smart guy), and I say "can I see your badge?"

*facepalm*

Really, I think I should drop out of college right now. Did I even refer to my own Handy tip #2, a.k.a. noticing their possession of GUNS? What scam police have guns? What stupid person tries to argue with someone who has a gun?

But this is making for a good story, right?

This is also when I will refer back to Handy tip #1, which is the cultural differences between police in the world. The railway police were VERY OFFENDED that I did not think they were police officers. They did a lot of pointing at their office sign, pointing at their badges, yelling about stupid Americans, etc., etc. It was a cool time.

Oh, yeah. Their office. After I refused to give them my passport, they decided that Nick and I needed to go into their office. It was a very tiny little office, with all the blinds drawn to hide us from the outside world.

And I actually thought, "Great. Is Prof. Aay going to have to come extradite us from this little office?"

It was about at this time that I decided they were real police and not scam artists (way to go, Katie). I also realized that only one of the three police officers was insanely angry (yelling the stupid American insults, etc.). The other two were calm and ended up being helpful. They convinced the upset officer not to search our backpacks like he wanted (thank goodness), and one explained to me that they were only using our passports to check our criminal record in the EU, so the fact that our student Visas for study in the Netherlands hadn't come through yet wasn't a huge deal (thank goodness some more).

Angry police officer was still very confused as to why I hadn't thought they were real police officers. I mumbled something about "the internet" and said the phrase "I apologize" about thirty times. He went off on something about how Italy was not some small country in Africa, etc.

Around this time (I think. It all blends together) we realized that Adam, Matteo, Anna, and Eric HAD indeed come back for us. Which was very, very good news, since having them run away would have made us look even more suspicious than my somewhat-misplaced resistance had. They entered their four passports into the computer, too, and let us go.

And we got out of there, with many many lessons learned. Like, refusing to give up your passport, while a good protective instinct to have, can make you look suspicious. And, respect the pride of the Italian police. And their guns.

Lessons aside, I must admit that we also had a few questions. Like, is stopping random tourists really the best use of the railway police's time? Just saying.

We made our way through a maze of broken escalators and long tunnels to the check-in desk. By this point, we were a bit behind schedule as far as checking in to our flight goes. EasyJet has a strict policy that no one can check in after 40 minutes before the flight, and we got to the counter with 10 minutes before that point. The line was long, and only one person was working behind the desk.

Just another example of the brilliance of Italian bureaucracy.

But we got checked in, only to walk across the room and get into a long security line. Actually, there were two lines, but they both fed into the same security scanner, so there really was only one line. Plus, the line was not moving very fast because they had a grand total of four bins for everyone to use to send their stuff through the scanners.

...

The good news after security was that our gate was not far away, and we were five minutes away from boarding. The weird news was that we could not see a plane at the gate, and our flight was not boarding. The board said nothing about a delay, but we weren't going anywhere.

Half an hour later, we started boarding...slowly. Every single person had to put their carry-on baggage into that little sizing bin before going through the gate (didn't we already do that at check-in?). Inch by inch, we made our way through the gate to board, then down the jetway to... a bus.

No wonder we hadn't seen our plane.

Half of the people in the boarding area were now crowded into the bus, and we drove off across the tarmac to find our plane. We found it and stopped.

Anna goes, "I bet they don't let us off the bus yet."

If we had actually been betting, Anna would be richer now. For, indeed, they did NOT let us off the bus right away. I half-laughed, half-grimaced. This was, what, instance 6 of the inefficiency of the Italian airport system? Our jokes while we waited about having to ride the bus all the way back to Amsterdam were only really half-jokes.

Finally, a man in a neon vest came off the plane and went over to his car. He rummaged around for a while and finally emerged with...

...his sunglasses. Then he went to work setting up the ropes and such that would keep us from wandering into the plane's engines, and after that let us off the bus.

We were then part of another easyJet RUSH TO THE PLANE moment as a bus full of people went to claim the best seats. Finally, we were on the plane, all in one piece. We could sit back, relax, and...wait for the second bus of passengers to show up.

I can only say that I spent nearly the entire flight sleeping, and it was well worth it. And when we got off the plane at Schipol, we were greeted with a clean, modern airport where all the moving walkways were working and, thanks to a tulip stand, the air smelled like flowers.

I had an amazing time in Rome. Those three days were days I will never forget.

But after those last few hours in the Italian airport, I can also say that it felt nothing short of wonderful to be back in this flat, gray, cold, crazy, friendly, beautiful country. I love the Netherlands!