Back from Europe's Outie - Or, Homeward Bound for the Asian Griswalds

Day 6 of my trip began with the same breakfast from the previous five days, the European equivalent of a continental breakfast--stale breads, cheese, coldcuts, cereals and coffee. We head out to the cultural center of Florence where we're informed many great works of art are showcased here, such as Michelangelo's David, but who wants to utilize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a masterpiece when there is a (European equivalent of a) mall next door? So we went shopping.

My family separated from the pack with these two brothers from our tourgroup, because I had lost a lackadaisical tournament of poker with one of them on the bus two days ago, and the prize was lunch. I was supposed to buy him lunch the day before, but forgot. And so we set out together but somehow, we lost them again right around lunchtime. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I honor things...especially debts owed. But I think my subconscious reluctance with paying off this debt was the fact I would have to have lunch with him. I would have gladly given him the money to buy his own lunch, but didn't want to spend time with him and lead him on. He had been coming on way too strong since that game with trying to point out all the things that we had in common in a "wow, we both went to high school? We're like soulmates" kind of way but then acting antagonistic when I wouldn't go in that direction so it was bugging me.

Michael and I found this pizza stand that had the most amazing pizza I've ever had. First of all, it was drenched in olive oil. I'm a compulsive blotter but by the 4th or 5th napkin, I gave up. The pepperoni slices had the thickness of miniature hockey pucks and the mushroom slice had 4 different types of mushrooms on it. So amazingly good.

We headed out to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa which was smaller than I expected it to be. But we had literally 10 minutes to see the tower, including the time it took from the gate to the tower which was a good half mile. Ridiculous. [Actually, about 4 minutes in, I found out from someone on the tour that their classmate had run up and down the tower timing it in 6 min. 22 seconds, so if I had sprinted right off the bus, I could have made it]. So most of us took pictures from the walkway halfway to the tower. There were some street vendors lining the walkway and one of them was selling medieval weapons. This guy sold swords, crossbows and those sticks with spiked iron balls attached by chains. This one kid in our tour touched one of the balls, and a crossbow came loose, falling. I grabbed the bow before it hit the ground and then all of a sudden, the owner of the cart is in my face, screaming at me not to touch the merchandise and and trying to coax the crossbow away from me, the way the cops on TV talk down a suspect with a gun, just before disarming him and beating his ass. So he takes the bow from me and tells me to leave and I'm hugely pissed off because if it hadn't been for me, he'd have a broken crossbow on his hands and he's flipping out. So we exchange some words, and not one of mine was a cuss word. Go me.

We run back to the bus only to find it...locked. It appears that our contracted bus driver has decided he will not drive until he receives tips in the amount of $2 euros per passenger ($44 Euros), even though we had all paid out the total tips for the trip to the guide to distribute accordingly on the second day. Our guide argues with him while these other drivers at the stop are telling us, "You'd better pay him because he could leave you guys in Rome and that's a very dangerous place for American tourists to be stranded." We collect money from everyone and the bus driver is willing to drive. We're not sure if it's a problem with communication with the tour company or the driver, but this has been indicative of this trip. This tour has been poorly planned and organized, and strange things just seem to keep happening. There are a lot of grumblings amongst the travelers. I expect many complaint letters will be written and consensus is that no one will be recommending this tour company to anyone.

On the four-hour busride to Rome, our guide informs us that she found us some New Year's Eve dinner thing but the price will be about $150 US per person. That price is ridiculously high. She says this is "for the young people who want something better, even though most of us will be happy just to spend New Year's Eve together." I don't think this is the point. The point is not that we want something trendier. The point is that we want something that makes the fact that it's New Year's Eve in Europe special. And it's not about going someplace trendy or expensive. It's just about being somewhere that feels celebratory, not some hole in the wall Chinese restaurant and then straight to bed. So I ask her if she could find out where people in Rome tend to gather, kind of like Union Square in San Francisco. Free but festive. That's all we want. She finds out the place but says it's nowhere near our hotel, which was supposedly in "downtown Rome." But throughout this tour, when they say we're staying "in" a city, it tends to mean "on the outskirts." She says we can get a taxi from the hotel. I question whether it will be hard to get a taxi on New Year's Eve and she assures me it'll be fine.

So we arrive in Rome and eat at the scheduled Chinese restaurant. Really bad food. Much grumbling from tour members but at this point, we've already outlined our complaint letters in our heads but that's all we can do other than just accepting things and trying to make the best of things. We get to the hotel which is in the middle of nowhere around 10:30pm, and find out that not only are there NO taxis, but the square is over an hour's walk away. It seems at every turn, our guide was trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, by seemingly to try to make plans, but making plans that were unpalatable, unreasonable or simply half-ass. Our guide tells us that we should just be happy to celebrate with the group in the hotel, but I don't want to sign off this night just yet. I talk to the front desk and find out there's actually an area of gathering only a 10 minute walk away. But by then, everyone has given up, and it's just my mom, brother and I. My mom says she doesn't want to walk if it's just us, since we've been filled with all kinds of stories about the dangers of mugging. So in the 11th hour, all efforts fail and we end up spending New Year's Eve in the hotel lobby with half of our group (the other half gave up and just went to bed) and the two people who work behind the front desk. New Year's Eve in Rome...in a hotel lobby. Like taking the kids to Disneyland but telling them they have to watch the rides from the parking lot. But fine...we have to make the most of it, you know? So we had champagne (I was on a mission to get drunk), and one of the front desk guys had a guitar so our tour guide played some music and I talked to one of the kids in the group who wants to be an actress about acting. Not a total wash.


The next day we were up bright and early doing a walking tour of Rome with an Italian guide. We hit the Coliseum which was closed so we observed its exterior. We saw some other landmarks, then headed over to Vatican City. Unfortunately, the Sistine Chapel was closed so we didn't get to see the ceiling. St. Peter's, the main chapel, is mindbogglingly huge. Apparently, Michelangelo dedicated the last 25 years of his life to designing the dome, and inside, it's quite breathtaking. Also, inside St. Peter's, you can find the embalmed body Pope John XXIII in a glass case. His face has been covered in some kind of wax to help preserve it, giving his head this bleached, unnaturally white hue. People are lined up to file past his body, observing and paying respects, but the thing that seemed to completely contradict the air of reverance was the fact that people would take pictures of him as he filed by, sometimes even with cellphone cameras. In the basement are the sarcophaguses of all the previous popes, lining this narrow, drafty passageway. You file by and you can touch them, knowing that their bodies are inside. I kept thinking how creepy this day must be for the young kids on the tour, who just went from seeing an embalmed body upstairs, to being squeezed into a crowded passageway lined by dead bodies.

Our guide kept telling us that going up to the tower of St Peter's was a once in a lifetime opportunity. So with a few minutes to go before the line was closed down, three of us head towards that line. Suddenly, this old guy with a walkie-talkie jumps in front of us and physically shoves us, yelling in Italian. People turn to look. He's going off and we're telling him that we don't understand him and he knows full well that we don't understand him but he keeps yelling and we get the drift that he's trying to tell us that the tower is closed and wants us to turn around. We tell him that we have over 5 minutes left and he's saying no. So someone in our group tells us we should just go. He's still screaming at us and we're telling him he's being unreasonable and it's this insane scene, this yelling match in Italian and English with this crowd watching. He tells the guard not to let us in. I mean, it's literally 3 people. At the end of the line. But the guy was being such a dick. The guard said he didn't care and yeah, it wasn't fair, but he couldn't let us in because that crazy guy was the boss. So we were pissed. We left and told our tour guide about the incident and he asked if it was the crazy old man who had flipped out when we had tried to take a group picture earlier. We said yeah and he said, "Ah...he's an evil man. And he will die an evil man's death." Nicely put.

I'm kind of upset at this point, because this whole trip of being here but not being able to see anything (ie the Coliseum & the Sistine Chapel being closed, not being able to get up to St. Peter's chapel, etc.) has frankly, sucked. It feels like this whole trip has been about making a list of things I want to see when I come back to Europe on a tour that DOESN'T suck, which makes it suck even more because it feels like we've wasted a lot of money coming on this one. And our tour guide spends more time apologizing for things and talking about personal problems and trying so hard to make sure we all still think she's a good person, rather than being professional.

I end up just finding my mom and brother (honestly? When you're feeling down? There's nothing like your friends and family to make you feel better) and walked around with them. At one point, we walked by these black guys selling fake watches. Now, our guide had spent the multiple-hour bus rides going on and on instilling the fear of God in us about muggers and pickpockets in Italy. So when we walk by, my brother, quite chivalrously, whispers, "Julia. Hold on to your purse. There are BLACK people."

Christ.

I immediately turn to my mom and say, "Did YOU teach him that?"

We met up with the group and head off to dinner. This is our last dinner on the tour as we're all flying back to the states tomorrow. You would expect it to be a celebration. A dinner experiencing the finest of regional Italian cuisine. A dinner that we write home about. Nope. We went to another fucking Chinese restaurant with bad food. In fact, the chicken wasn't even fully cooked. I kid you not.

So to recap....rang in New Year's Eve in a near empty hotel lobby in Rome as off in the (walking) distance, thousands joyously celebrated, ate bad Chinese food for 3 out of 4 meals in Italy, bus driver tried to extort money out of us, and tour guide could not offset her lack of knowledge or competence with displays of "niceness" and pleas for personal sympathy.

Unimax Travel out of Alhambra, CA. The most unprofessional tour outfit I've ever encountered. Feel free to bombard them with hate mail.

I ended up getting sick the last night in Rome (after our last Chinese meal; unrelated to uncooked chicken) and missed out on the last get together. A bunch of people wanted to go out together and explore, but word was that the tour guide had invited herself. We all agreed to rest for an hour and then regroup, so I went to take a nap but woke up feverish and damn near hallucinating, as I could have sworn that my tour guide was IN MY ROOM, talking to me. No, wait. She had actually let herself into my room and was talking to me. [*sigh* I'm not even going to cuss here. But honestly. HONESTLY. Letting herself into someone else's room???] She figured that since I hadn't answered my phone (in fact, I think I hung up once), that she would come and get me. So I realized I was too sick to go out. I had caught a nasty cold from walking around in freezing weather all day. Later I heard that I hadn't missed much. She showed people some random buildings and didn't really know where she was going, when people really just wanted to hang out in a cafe or bar and chat.

I was really sick the next day but thankfully someone had some tylenol flu, which got me through the 11 hour flight from Rome to New York. New York found me asleep on the dirty floor of JFK Airport. Another 6 hours from JFK to San Francisco, 3 hours of sleep, the first morning flight out from San Jose to Los Angeles, and I was finally back home, long enough to drop off my luggage and go to work, then leave early to crawl into bed.

On the positive side, they're opening a Zankou Chicken 2 minutes away from me!