It's 3:00 am . . . and a scary black form enters my room. The half-naked Asian in the bed next to mine yelps, waking me. I groan as I feel a familiar pain in my lower back from sleeping on bed too soft, and roll over to find the black form barring down. I tense, knowing that I had given a potential enemy an unfair advantage, but at the same time also aware that he would certainly need it. But there is no need, the man is drunk, and on closer inspection just some dumb frat boy. I quietly hear the Asian apologize, and so decide to roll over and attempt to return to sleep.
As it turns out, my first Hostel experience is a lot like sleeping in a ditch -and in a completely different way than I would have expected.
What I would have expected:
"Welcome to Hostel You Sleep Cheap!"
"Hi."
"You sleep cheap?"
"Yeah, that's me."
"Pay now, only cash – dollar, euro, peso, is all good. No traveler check."
I hand over my money.
"Ah, Euro" attendant smells money, "For you, I get nice bed," as he continues to sniff my money in rapture.
"Okay, to get to bed you need take bus, you lucky last one, we go now." I go out to a refurbished paddy wagon in the back alley, open the back door. The people that greet me are covered in grime. Melancholy faces, they barely look up at me. There's no air conditioning on the bus. We drive for an hour, no one talks, I thank heaven for the powerful body odor which covers what I believe is the smell of human excrement. Finally we stop. Two obese, poorly shaved men in unwashed wife beaters who both look like they could be first cousins of my super Ves, open the wagon door.
"Yashha boyeah zhuga" says one. "Uhp Uhp!" the other intones. We file out of the paddy wagon. I find myself in the clearing of an unknown forest, late at night. In the center of the clearing is a freshly dug hole. "In." one says. People begin filing into the hole. There isn't enough room. People start piling on top of each other. Those on the bottom struggle, but eventually it appears they stop. I hold off until the end, and get a spot on top of the pile. I turn over and fall asleep to the sound of men heaving, and a slow pitter patter of dirt building up on top of my skin.
Reality:
The bed I sleep in is a very, very firm layer of cloth, wrapped around the frame, a bit like a hammock. When I put my weight down in it, the cloth bends and so the way it ends up my body is below the edge of the frame. As I say, as if I was in a ditch. So not that bad, although it did give me strange and terrifying dreams. I now have an idea what may have given Kafka such wondrously terrifying story ideas.
I awake again at 6:30 as the Spaniards arise. I mostly sleep through their ministrations.
Finally at 9:00 I awake to begin my route. My plan is to cover the city in two days, the first day making a broad arc across the Northern most edge of the city, which would take me to the west of Rome, over the river Tiber, and into Vatican City. Afterwards, I will head back across a more central part of Northern Rome, and see how long it will have taken me.
I set out, stopping in briefly at a supermarket near my hostel. I found a ridiculous bargain on bottled water, an entire two liters for only twenty-five cents. I think to myself, why not have a smooth, refreshing sip to get the morning started. I turn the plastic cap and immediately hear a tell-tale hiss, as my water fills with bubbles. I had inadvertently bought seltzer water. Inspecting the bottle, I found the two seemingly-innocuous, but actually fatal words, which had sealed my fate: "Con Gas." Normally I do not prefer seltzer to regular water; I drink it grudgingly between biscuits, if at all. There was something strange about the taste of the seltzer too. I suspect the producers were using "con gas" as an excuse to con me into buying dangerously low grade water.
I mark out my first site, a gate at the east side of town, with a statue to commemorate the soldiers of the great war. Along the way I spot a café and finally decide to get the Italian version of the standard overpriced breakfast menu that can be found throughout all of France – Juice, cappuccino, and pastry for 5 Euro. I justify the price by spending a good forty minutes there, until I finish Les Justes. Thus I have a second project for the day, finding a new book to read.
I take a picture of myself using the camera timer, and have surprising success. I admit that as I took the picture I felt a bit a fool, posing for myself as cars passing by honked at me, and horn-dog Italians whistled cat calls in my general direction – I have no way of knowing if they were meant for me or some other moving-thing in my general vicinity.
I begin the great northern arc and track along the old city wall. I stop in a bookstore but find the foreign books section to consist only of works by Judith Piccolo and Dan Brown. I detest both of them. If you're going to write under a pseudonym, at least pay me the courtesy of picking a name that sounds unique. But I suppose for some books even the name of the author has to be kept at the third-grade level.
Dallying along the wall for too long, I drop south from the old wall, stumbling towards a few big old buildings from the late 17th, early 18th century. About this time I encounter a group of expensive hotels with American names. It occurs to me that maybe I can cherry-pick some free internet from them using my iPod touch. All of the places that are giving me any signal are pass protected, however, save one. I can see it flickering in and out, like color in half-light, something called "Roma WiFi." Was the signal of free public, city-funded wifi real? Or merely a mirage, fabricated from a devil's admixture of human desire and too-cooked air?
Near one of the fancy hotels I see a sign for Park of the Borguese. Such a park is nowhere to be found on my map. Aware of my near-disaster attempting to find that Belgian El Dorado, which the natives know by the name "Atomium," I nevertheless decide to test fate and follow the sign where it leads. Luckily, after crossing the city wall again, I stumble upon the Park's central entrance, which also has a beautiful map giving me the lay of the land.
What is immediately apparent is that the park is a magnificent treasure. Large as the combined total of the Tulieries and Luxembourg gardens, it is full of beautiful gems: remnants of antiquity, botanic gardens, cafés, and museums. I decide to place a two-hour delay in my planned route, so that I can wander the park.
But in drawing up my plan of attack for this great Northern park, I see, marked like pox, green stickers which say "WiFi!" I head for the hot-spot on the park's east side.
While crossing the park, I happen upon a simple fountain amidst a slight clearing in the wood. Suddenly I feel my legs buckle, my breath catches in my throat, held so tight that I begin to choke, eyes turn blood-red from asphyxiation. A horrible pain seizes my chest, I feel as if a great blow lands on my back. And I am thrown to my knees.
I was under attack. But, this seemed impossible, since there was no readily-visible assailant, and in my current space-time continuum the Bonapartists did not yet have cloaking devices. It was something else, as if it were my body itself that was betraying me. But no, I thought, my body would not be capable of such tretchery – it must be. . .
"BEAUTY!" I cried, but only to myself for it had smashed my voicebox and deflated my lungs. Beauty - coming in through my eye. I was its beholder and as such I could not let it go. Tears come to me unbidden as I whelp helplessly. Alas, I am slain, and without the chance for a clever rejoinder: a last touché to death, who even in denying me life, simultaneously ensures that I have the final word.
But just then, I hear something:
"Hey Marlene, look at this thing!"
With my final bust of strength I crane my eyes upwards to see the trundling form of a morbidly obese American, in camouflage shorts and Stars-and-Stripes shirt. In an instant I gasp, my breath releases, and I crumple to the floor panting, weak, but saved. Thank God for Americans, if it wasn't for them, an overabundance of beauty might come into the world and slaughter us all.
Ready now for the fountain's beauty, I inspect the scene to see what it was that had so affected me. It is not the fountain itself, that's for sure, nor is it the clearing and the fountains placement in it as the mis-en-scene. A great analyst, in an unpublished volume which I somehow have access to, came within striking distance of solving the problem of conjectures, thereby rendering analysis itself a trivial clerical exercise. One of his maxims is "Never underestimate the ubiquitous – somehow it manages to find its way into everything." I tell you now that his genius has been proved once again, for when I looked upon the scene with his maxim in mind, everything instantly became illuminated – it was the lighting.
I cannot explain why, but somehow the lighting in the park was absolutely perfect. Strong, but not overpowering, it make the whole scene more lustrous, colors became fuller, textures became richer. The scene before me looked less like reality and more like a painting. I see now why the Renaissance started in Italy – the natural light provided the inspiration.
After several attempts to capture the magical affect of Italian light on film, I finally make it to an enormous column-like building from the Roman period. I see it has been defaced by graffiti. Rome has been ruined by the Italians, we should have trusted it to a more responsible people –like the Germans.
Around this tower children were playing soccer. I think to myself what a wonderful thing an impressive building is. How many children, in how many generations, must have said to each other, let's go play by the big column? How much happiness it must have given them to have as a place to meet as their hang-out.
Of course the pleasure that I wanted to extract from this hang-out was the simple pleasures of a child. No, the kind of pleasure I wanted was that which only comes from a good checking of my email. There were supposed to be three separate WiFi routers in the plaza I was in. Indeed, I connect fine to all three. But when I go to browse the web, at each separate router, I get the same message "Not connected to Internet."
What? Wifi – but no internet. How could this be? What the hell kind of city would create a wifi network, without connecting it to the internet. Who would dare to concoct such an absurd masquerade?
But then it dawned on me. Let's say you don't connect to the wifi network. What's your first reacton? Maybe their computer is screwed up. They didn't set things up right. Etc. But if you connect to their network, and then you can't connect to the internet, the first reaction is, What is going wrong with my computer? I connected fine, why can't my computer connect to the internet?
What's so clever about this strategy is that it's exactly the type of thing that's at the limit of plausibly being an unintentional oversight. Oh, so there isn't any non-E.U. passport exit. We never thought about that since we're all in the E.U. Wait –we need to pay for internet, but I thought we already bought wifi? These Italian public officials are either idiotic buffoons or they're tricksters clever enough to pose as buffoons. Determining which was the case would become one of my foremost goals in my anthropological investigation of Italy - beside scoring of course.
I continue through the park, narrowly avoiding being roped into a mob of people practicing jazzercise in a public square. I wind up on the west end of the park, getting another panoramic view of the city, this time from the North. Seizing my last memory of the view, I descend from the park's high bluff, down into a public square.
In the square there is a public exhibition commemorating Rome's police department – which consists mainly of cops walking around, dressed in uniforms from the 1930s, and also driving around old-model police cruisers from various eras. All in all, the exhibit ends up being a lot of big tennis. Cop cars are cool, but there's a reason Jake and Elway never drove a Fiat.
I go into a pizza place near the plaza and ask for an order. The guy asks me how much I want. I say 1. Apparently this is not an acceptable answer. He looks at me a bit funny, says something I don't understand. I follow my standard "sail through any encounter" strategy: nod your head and make a face that can be construed either as emphatic agreement or refusal. The theory behind this is, "I don't understand the situation, let's see how the other guy plays it." He cuts me off what looks like a big slice and I take it to the register. At the register the cashier weighs my pizza. Suddenly I understand, pizza in this type of place is sold by weight.
"How many grams of pizza would you like?"
"Oh, I'll take one."
"What?"
"Just one will be fine."
After eating my pizza I wander into a bookstore downtown and find an entire French section. I pick up another existentialist play, Sartre's "Les Mains Sales: Un Piece en Sept Tableaux" (English Title: Dirty Hands: A Play in Seven Parts). Happy with my purchase, I continue along to the tomb of Augustus Ceaser – dear Octavian's monument is superseded only by that of Napoleon and the old Egyptian Pharaohs.
By now I'm nearly on the banks of the Tiber, due east from the Vatican. I make my approach and find myself staring down Saint Peter's Basillica. There is no shade on the road approaching the cathedral, the weight of my bag and the still undrunk gaseous water cuts my shoulder like a terrible wooden-burden. I drag along, through the middle of the road, as the powerful sun beats down on me. I feel feint, hot, oh Father, forgive me, I don't know what I'm doing.
Finally I arrive at the cathedral. To enter the cathedral one needs to observe a rather stringent dress code. Shorts and t-shirts are ostensibly forbidden, meaning I may have to go all the way back to the other side of town if I want to see the cathedral today. Concerned, I watch to see who is making it through security. After about ninety seconds it's already apparent that although the code is proscribed for both men and women, only one type of person is being denied entry. This type is of course the woman, usually 17-24, sometimes as young as 13, rarely as old as 46, who is so bent on turning herself into a sex-object that she cannot suppress for more than two hours the need to reveal some part of every part of her body. Needless to say, I love this type, and was sad to see them ostracized from probably the one place in the world where they are most sorely needed. However, I did not pine their absence too much, and instead pressed on into the cathedral.
Once inside the cathedral I again notice the powerful effect of natural light in Italy. The light that streams down from the windows actually looks like columns, and as they stream down on groups of nuns standing underneath them, I feel the power of their holiness and the sanctity of the church. Unlike Notre Dame, this cathedral is frequented by practicing catholics. I become moved by the fastidiousness of their faith, and the majesty of God's home. I think: What if this is the moment I become a Catholic? Then the old Jewish man's voice pricks up again in my head,
"I told ya you was a goyasha, you pric, you self-hater anti-semite, you- Shylock. Go then, be a Catholic, I don't care."
Nope, looks like that's not happening. I walk around the Cathedral, taking pictures, absorbing its excessive austerity. I wander through some door with security guards who don't stop me, and find a passageway filled with art. As I turn a corner, I see a procession of young catholic priests in purple robes forming up. They motion me to go behind them, and I stand with several other caught tourists in a small gift shop, watching as older and older Bishops, and possibly even Cardinals, prepare for some important ritual. I wonder, what if I see the Pope? But sadly he doesn't show, the procession moves out after fifteen minutes and I leave the cathedral.
I wander out and make for the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately the chapel is closed so I instead wander towards a gelato place. The gelato is so good that it forces me to sit.
It is nearly sunset, and so I walk south along the length of the Tiber. I'm heading for a neighborhood that is recommended for food as being not super touristy but still touristy enough to have lots of restaurants. When I arrive it turns out to be the neighborhood where I had been the night before.
After a rather unremarkable dinner, not bad but not anything you couldn't get in Chicago. When I get up from dinner I suddenly realize that I have a horrible, horrible rash on my inner thighs that makes it difficult to walk. Where did this come from? I didn't have it before. Maybe I did? But how could that be. Suffice it to say that it had to be treated, with a good shower at my hostel. I make out a more direct path than the one from the night before. Along the way I run into the old Jewish quarter. This is supposedly a good place to eat, so I mark it on my map and decide to come back the next night.
While walking through the Jewish quarter my path crosses that of an enormous man, with shaggy hair, and scars on his face. Not exactly homeless-looking, his visage is still frightening. I pick up my pace. It doesn't exactly seem like he's following me, more like his path is in the same direction as mine, but he must have been walking behind me for a good fifteen minutes and so managed to scare the buhjeezus out of me. It was good that I'd actually been with Jesus that day, and hence had an abundance of buhjeezus, otherwise I probably would have been really creeped out. By the time I get to the monument Vittorio Emanuell, he was already long gone, so the whole incident couldn't have lasted more than twenty minutes. The rest of my journey to the Hostel is marked only by increasing resentment towards my horrible, horrible rash.
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