Surviving Rome

I wanted to rent scooters in Rome for a reason so embarrassing that I'm going to admit it once and then never again.

Mary Kate and Ashley.  

Let's get this over with: the Olsen twins have a movie set in Rome where they meet boys and the boys rent scooters and zoom them around the city and to me it looked like fun, okay?  If it's any excuse, I watched it in the van on a cross-country car ride.  And I have a younger sister.  Sorry for being a good big brother!

My reputation thoroughly shattered, let me tell you -- there is nothing "Mary Kate and Ashley"  about driving in Rome.  

Rome was the last city on "Troy and Eric's Backpacking Trip."  We had scheduled two nights and 1.5 days there -- a positively sprawling amount of time for our sprinting travel style (we'd spent 6 hours in Switzerland and called it "visited.")   

I wanted to end the trip on a bang for several reasons.  First of all, as wonderful as old buildings are, there's really only so much you can take.  Troy has a "One cathedral per country" rule that, by the trip's end, was wisdom on par with Lao Tzu ("A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.")  or Mike Ditka (“You have to be tough.”).  

Secondly, we had missed seeing Auschwitz.  The Holocaust is a new fascination of mine.  I'm taking a graduate English class on Holocaust poetry next semester.  So I desperately wanted to visit the camp.  Unfortunately, the day we spent in Krakow, Poland was Easter Sunday.  Auschwitz is closed on Christmas and Easter.  That didn't stop Troy and I from taking a two-hour train to the camp, walking a mile to the entrance, and getting as close as we could.  But we had missed out on the tour, the museum, the experience.  I was very disappointed.

Mostly, though, I wanted our Eurotrip to stand out.  This might be even more unforgivable than the Mary Kate and Ashley comment, but here it goes: by the time you've been trekking across Europe for three weeks, trekking across Europe isn't enough.  Being in Rome isn't enough.  It's the norm.  It's level zero.  It's Rome, yes, but it's also "the next stop."  When yesterday is Vienna and tomorrow Venice, novelty becomes normalcy.  

This is a difficult sensation to express, and perhaps even more difficult to understand.  I imagine, someday, looking back on this post during a lunchbreak at a 9 to 5 job, I'll shake my head at calling Rome "the norm," a term that connotes the sense that being in Rome just wasn't enough.  (To that future version of me: Shut up and eat your carrot sticks.)  Seeing the sights wasn't enough.  I had to do something thrilling.  Dangerous.  In that sense, I didn't just want to rent scooters, but had to.  

There's one more reason, then I promise I'll talk about the miracle of Troy and I surviving the scooter day.  That reason: I needed to earn a soundbyte -- something to take care of the question waiting for us as soon as we returned: "How was the trip?"

This question is a problem for me.  There's no good way to answer it.  I can say "Great!  We had a blast."  Or I can list all the cities we went to.  But far and away the best and most honest way to answer that is to tell people a story.  Humans respond to stories more than lists or banal descriptions of pleasure.  And believe me, there's no story like this one.

Roman traffic is a free for all.  Everyone attempts risky maneuvers for selfish advantages.  Fearless pedestrians walk against red lights (at the intersections that actually have stoplights) while sipping coffee and chatting.  Drivers change lanes suddenly to shave off a few seconds.   It's madness.

The scariest part is that you can't be passive.  Being passive is a recipe for disaster.  Drive too slowly, and suddenly angry motorcycles are whizzing by you and a chorus of horns are blaring. And you never want to enrage an Italian behind the wheel.  Very quickly, I discovered the best strategy was to try to blend in, even if that meant weaving in and out of stopped cars or gunning it to slip through a rapidly shrinking gap between a bus and oncoming traffic.

None of this compares to the roundabouts.  Roundabouts are spinning circuses of destruction.  Traffic merges in from seven different ways at once, vehicles weaving in and out of one another The first time we approached one, I felt like that kindergartener standing at the top of the highdive and looking down the million miles to the pool.  Except here, there was no turning back.

I survived out of instinct.  There's no time to step back and analyze or look for a protective pocket in the chaos.  You just go, and trust that you're good enough and lucky enough.  

I said quite a few prayers that day.  And remarkably, we not only survived, but the biggest hiccup was the navigational frustration of trying to get to the Pantheon from the cafe where we had lunch.  

Later, after we had returned our scooters, I asked Troy what he had thought our odds were of A) having something -- anything -- go wrong, whether an accident or a dinked bike or a scraped knee and B) getting seriously hurt.  If the Olsen twins or the "norm" of Rome made it beneath the censorship radar, his responses most certainly will not.

Later I told my friend Ben that I drove scooters in Rome.  Ben had been to Rome on a University trip last winter.  In order to go on the trip, he had to sign a contract saying he would not rent any motorized vehicles.

I think the definition of a "story" is anything worth wasting breath on.  Which means to obtain a story, you have to do something that deviates from the norm.  The bigger the deviation, the bigger the story.  This explains our fascination with stories about tempting or defying death -- of going to the edge and coming back to live and talk about it.  I don't know if you could say that Troy and I tempted death.  That seems a bit dramatic.  But we certainly deviated enough to get that "soundbyte."

So when people ask me how the trip was, I say: "Great.  I toured Rome on a scooter and am living to tell about it."    

Most of it, anyway.