This blog entry is, more than anything, just a footnote to the last one, since it happened in Rome but didn’t feel right to tack it on at the end.

I arrived at the Termini station on the last day of the Rome weekend nearly three hours before I was set to fly. All the shuttle busses towards the airport leave from the central train station, but the cheapest of busses wasn’t set to leave until 4:15, forty-five minutes– well that’s fine, let’s just get some snacks and come back. We come back at 3:50 and this 4:15 bus is already there, already nearly-packed. When did all those people get there? I rush past everyone and my friend– having a flight three hours later– leaves with a ‘good luck’. Luck wasn’t in the picture today. I push up to the front when a mother manages to shoulder in and grab those last three seats for her and her kids. So the bus pulls away– when’s the next bus? Five o`clock. The gate for my flight closes at 5:50.

I sprint across the Termini station, through the mad streams of rush-hour workers, to the other bus company. Guess what: they also have busses only at 415 and 5. In what world is that an economically viable operation? Two different bus companies, going the same place, leaving at the same time— dealing in an industry where timing is everything? This isn’t the place to rant about Italian infrastructure; this is just a story about what comes next. Would the 5 o’clock get me there in time? The woman shakes her head and instead points to the army of yellow and black taxis at the other end.

When I think back to that day, I wonder if it’s as much what I didn’t do as what I did that made everything seemingly fall apart. Call it the remnants of some Irish superstition, but the one thing I was told– by a temporary Roman resident– that I had to do was throw a coin in the Trevi fountain. If I didn’t, there’s no guarantee I would ever come back to Rome. While I’d walked by it my first night, I didn’t have enough time on my last day to toss it, leaving me strangely anxious as we walked towards the train station. Of course, my far more rational friend snapped me out of it with a quick slap to the neck and a classic “you’re being an artsy idiot right now”. Good old Rob. But now the superstitions come back: maybe what happened after he left makes me never want to come back?

I was in such a fluster as I sprinted towards those cabs that I stopped thinking about what it might cost me, what might be acceptable or what I might lose. One man apparently noticed– fed off of– my distress when he asked if I wanted a taxi. He said the Ciampino airport would cost forty euros. I did a quick run to the metro map, remembering reading about how you could take the metro all the way to the end, then a bus to the airport after that. But I was alone: I had no internet, no laptop to grab internet, no friends left. And I was running out of time. So I agreed. Forty euros, not terrible right?

Except his cab wasn’t with the rest. As we walked ten minutes away from the station I started to realize something was wrong, and then he told me to get into his car, his car that wasn’t a taxi. Why did I get in? It’s probably one of the least logical things I’ve ever done. But I felt so lost– airport so faraway– and all I could think about was making that flight, making it home to finish that essay. Then the moment I stepped in the car, backpack in the trunk, I realized I’d made the wrong choice. This car was falling apart– rust on its edges, no airbag in the front– and this ‘cabbie’ could barely speak English. Well better than my Italian. What was to stop him from taking me to some random far-off area of the city? what was to stop him from mugging me or whatever worse was going through my head at that point? I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know the city. I was alone.

As we drove towards, well, somewhere, he manages to tell me that because of this unexpected traffic (yes, traffic at four o’clock out of the city on a weekday is so strange), he’s raising the price to sixty euros. Grasping onto just about anything, I tried to read his desire to squeeze every penny out of me as proof he wasn’t planning to mug me. It didn’t stop me from melting into the seat. Driving past sometimes housing projects and sometimes open fields, I counted the seconds through my teeth. And when the Campiano signs finally began scrolling by, it didn’t stop the dread.

Because his price was going up. I knew– as the price became seventy became eighty– that he would throw me out on the side of the road if I didn’t accept the new scribbles on the pad between us. At one point I even paid the ten euros for his gas. When we got near the airport he gave me his, apparently final, price: 100. Wow, that traffic sure makes a difference, doesn’t it? When I honestly told him I could only pay 85, he pushed me out on the side of the freeway and threw my backpack out the window. I had to sprint and bang on the window to grab my wallet from his seat.

So I ran across the freeway, walked those last ten minutes to the airport, and bought one big fucking white chocolate toblerone in the duty free. Nothing happened; just get me back to Paris.

Now, this is a dramatic re-write of it; maybe I’m making it into more than it should be. I guess what disturbs me about all of this isn’t what happened so much as what could have. It was the first time in Europe I’d felt truly and totally lost– and not that good kind of culture shock lost Lonely Planet guides tell you about. I was lost in a language I didn’t know at all, alone, without phone coverage. It’s not a stretch to say that anything could have happened (at one point I pretended to be texting my friend as if to show I at least had a working phone). I wish I could end this off with  a clean and tidy message about what I learned from this experience, but nothing comes to mind. It’s hard to say, beyond not taking the cab, what I could have done differently: given myself four instead of three hours before the flight? In the end I learned at least this much: clean off the tourist’s veneer, and Rome isn’t North America, isn’t even Paris. Sometimes that’s exhilarating, and sometimes that’s a little too real. Sometimes it’s a little terrifying. I’ll keep that in mind the next trip I plan.