Anyone who bikes down the roads of center city Rome doesn’t value their life much, and frankly I want them dead anyway.
This may sound harsh, but the sidewalks in Rome are generally wide enough for one and a half persons to comfortably walk down. That’s not even taking into account the space a pedestrian needs to keep open for any random driver deciding to spontaneously pop a wheelie and hop the curb at the speed of light. Perhaps it’s customary in Rome to take juuuuust one shot of whiskey and a few bumps of you-name-it before getting behind the wheel and attempting to bend the physics of space and time.
Heavy morning commute traffic doesn’t bother the taxis in Rome; a driver can still get you to your destination in a timely manner by making the sidewalk your own express lane and mowing down all pedestrians in your path. The cyclists take advantage of the pedestrian’s vulnerabilities as well. To give you an idea, a cyclist in Rome isn’t afraid of touching tips with a car, let alone crushing the toes or more of a local child. All roads lead to Rome, and it seems all sidewalks do as well.
A pedestrian must be on the constant lookout when traipsing around Rome, lest they invite their obituary to say “she was just another lovely rogue merked in Rome” .
I felt disappointed the first time I nearly got runover in Rome, and not because I eye-fucked death. I’ve done that plenty of times rafting down the creek or biking across Canyon Boulevard while I lived in Boulder, Colorado. I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to walking as a main mode of transportation after a few unpleasant bus ride experiences.
It started from the moment we thought of stepping foot in Rome. My travel group arrived 30 minutes early to the bus station for a 3 hour bus ride from Florence, which gave us enough time to take a breath and sip a milked-down coffee. Around noon, the four of us traipsed to the bus stop.
“This bus tracker app says our bus is still in Bologna,” my friend Emma said, squinting down at her phone. “That can’t be right, that’s still at least a couple of hours away.”
“Maybe the app didn’t update yet,” Carla said. We all agreed and looked expectantly at the road leading to the bus entry lot.
Noon came and went. Then 12:10. Then 12:15.
“I’m gonna go talk to the lady at the information desk,” Tristan said.
“Wait! The app was updated, there’s a 2.5 hour delay,” Emma said. “Our new departure time is at 3:30.”
It could’ve been worse; the bus station had sandwiches and suspiciously floppy veggie chips. We each found our own designated spots in the shade to hunker down. I spent the three hours writing, drinking coffee, and going to the janky bus station bathroom 5 times to pee out said coffee.
Around 2:10, we packed up our things to head back to the bus stop.
I started to say, “That actually wasn’t so bad–”
“Oh my god,” Emma was checking the bus tracker app. “Our bus is STILL in Bologna. 2 more hours.”
One by one, we sat back down. No one said anything, and that’s when I started laughing.
If I’d experienced this alone, I probably would’ve cried. It was the collective calm of my travel companions that kept me at ease. They say you should travel with someone before you decide to marry them, and by this standard I would marry everyone in this travel group and no one in my immediate family. Reading that back, that worked out well.
The second round of waiting wasn’t as pleasant. The late afternoon hours arrived and settled to steam in the heat. The sweat on the backs of our necks reminded us we were in for a long day.
At 4:00 Emma checked the bus tracker app. “It’s on the road still some ways away… wait the app is updating… OHMYGOD! IT’S BACK IN BOLOGNA! How is that even possible?! I don’t understand…”
For context, Emma is a very easygoing person. We got on well; I knew I liked her when we met the first night of the trip and she said unprompted that if she were to be any food she’d be a rotisserie chicken. Emma’s goofy and go with the flow nature made her a delightful presence to be around on a trip.
So keep in mind if you’ve ever had a plane, train, or bus get delayed more than one time for several hours, you know that feeling of panic and uncertainty that starts to flood your thoughts. Would the bus ever pick us up? Or would it remain in Bologna, which we all now considered a wretched place without ever having been there, forever? Would we spend the night at the bus station? Would we gradually dehydrate until we sucked the dirt beneath our feet in a futile attempt to moisten our cracked, wooden tongues?
“I read a story of how these two girls got lost on a hike and one ended up eating the other,” Carla had mentioned earlier in the day.
I scanned the group. I’d eat Emma, I decided. I love rotisserie chicken.
In the end, we decided to get tickets for a different bus and apply for a refund for the one that’d grown roots in Bologna.
Our new bus turned out to be a double decker big dawg. We climbed the stairs to find our seats in rows 3 and 4 on the left side.
As the bus began rolling toward Rome, the air vents above our heads began to weakly splutter a lukewarm breeze that was reminiscent of an old French men’s cigarette burnt lunged wheeze. It soon smelled like dog breath so strongly I turned around to see if there was a Great Dane sitting behind me. There was just a mom and a kid who was humming and kicking the back of Carla’s seat beside me. There must’ve been a small dog trapped in the air vent, panting through the other side.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was delighted to find an hour had already passed. I looked through the front windshield at the horizon ahead, and saw signs for the highway to Rome.
Then my gaze fell upon the bus driver in the front left seat. Huh, he had ear buds in… and was eating a sandwich with one hand… he hasn’t looked up in about 20 seconds… he’s reading a book with the other hand?
What was he driving with, his kneecaps or the absolute gamble of our lives? I shot up like a cork to see how we weren’t swerving off the road.
There was no driver’s wheel in front of him. I’d forgotten during my nap we were on the top floor of a double decker bus. This man wasn’t the driver, just a passenger rightfully not keeping an eye on the road.
About an hour later Emma turned around in her seat to settle her gray blue eyes on Carla and I. The congestion of a cold she’d been fighting the last few days was visible on her face.
“Have you seen the Great Dane?” I asked.
“This bus,” she said. “Is a prison.”
I found myself repeating Emma’s words the next day on the top floor of yet another double decker bus on a tour of the historical landmarks of Rome.
We’d eaten lunch a couple of hours before our 3:30 tour time, and I’d noticed after the meal something wasn’t sitting right with me.
I get motion sick on a good day in cars and buses. In fact, I wrote this on a bus from Dublin to Galway, and in the middle of the last page I ran to the bathroom to hurl. This happens often when I travel and write in moving vehicles. I’ll start to feel my stomach turn, but the words on the page will be cooking, and I’ll literally write myself to the point of being sick. Gotta strike when the iron’s hot.
It wasn’t a good sign that I was at the point of wanting to yak before getting on the tour bus, but as we walked to the station my nausea subsided and was replaced with an urgent need to go to the bathroom.
My stomach will settle once I sit down, I thought, and decided to roll the dice. I boarded the bus to make the first move in what actually may be the most dangerous game.
As soon as the bus started to move I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.
The bus was pretty empty, so we’d all taken a window seat on the top floor of the bus. As my stomach spun like a washing machine on turbo, I tried to focus on the audio of the tour guide coming through the bus speakers underneath the window.
“This is where Julius Caesar was stabbed in 44 BC,” the tour guide said as I pressed my sweaty forehead into the back of the seat in front of me.
“This bus is a prison,” I whispered to the floor. “And I paid 30 euros to be here.”
I started to consider my options. I couldn’t throw up out the window, as there were people seated on their first floor with their windows open. I didn’t trust myself or the wind to ensure a clear trajectory to expel my inner turmoil, and it would be very awkward to throw up on people I had to walk by down the aisle to the bus exit.
I couldn’t last another minute.
“I’m getting off at the next stop,” I whispered into Carla’s ear in front of me.
She turned to look at me and her eyes widened. “Oh my god, are you okay?”
“No, and apparently neither were the meatballs I had for lunch.”
We miraculously arrived at the next stop within a minute. As I stumbled off the bus, delirious, I imagined Caesar’s last words were actually “Et tu Brutus? You got the meatballs too?”
There was a desolate RV park right across the street. It looked like the perfect place to go alone to risk unspeakable acts being done to me. So I went and I did them myself.
After about an hour of ejecting the food poisoning out of me I laid in the sun on the side of the parking lot. My phone was dead, and there was no Wawa within five million miles of me. I got up and started to walk.
Eventually I wandered into what appeared to be a dry cleaners. The lady at the counter took pity on me and let me plug my phone in the corner. I sat atop a pile of unfolded shirts and waited.
Google maps revealed I was currently in the boonies of Northern Rome. The closest bus station was a two mile walk. So I got up off of the shirt pile and walked some more.
When I got to the station, depleted and slightly traumatized from the day, I found the station to be out of service. So I cried, and called a taxi to my hostel.
We ran into some late evening traffic, but it was of no matter. We took the sidewalks home.
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