Bad Start – Happy Ending

It was the night before Easter and all through the town, not a room was available, not a single one around.

Here we were, just off the train from Rome and all prepared to crash in our Florence apartment for a nine-day stay.  It was Easter weekend, and the city was packed with tourists and students— the busiest weekend of the year.  Boy, were we happy we had confirmed reservations! 

Confirmed in Italy does not necessarily imply that the agency you are renting from will have your apartment.  It’s not really a commitment.  (Some U.S. hotels are getting like this too, so I’m not picking on the Italians;after all, my grandfather and grandmother were born here.)  In fact, our apartment became mysteriously “unavailable.” “Unavailable”  I suspect meant that 1) a relative showed up and needed a place to stay or 2) the agency could make more money by renting the apartment to someone else.  Regardless here we were, no place to stay, it’s late on the Saturday before Easter, we’re speaking little Italian and totally clueless about what we were going to do next.

Now comes the agent from whom we had rented the apartment.  He had a deal for us—another apartment in the same building.   We took a look.  It was small, dirty, dark and had no Internet access.  We said “No.” This is a big agency and has lots of apartments in Florence—find us something comparable to our “confirmed reservation.”  Well, he couldn’t do that because this was the busiest weekend in Florence, and everything was booked.  His tone suggested we had better take what he was offering or be prepared to sleep under a bridge.

Now Florence is beautiful and had the weather been warmer and not raining, sleeping under the famed Ponte Vecchio wouldn’t have been all that bad.  The Arno was below flood stage. What could go wrong?  Our agent waited patiently for us to cave in and accept his offer.  After all, where would we go.  Two foreigners in a hostile land?  We had paid a deposit, but we had our euros tucked safely in our pockets, so we looked disaster in the face and told him we were VERY disappointed in his agency (italy-accom.com) and that his “solution” was unacceptable.  Off we went, and that was one surprised Brit.  We had no idea what we were going to do next, but it was good to be free of this agent, agency and the mess it had created for us.

I do think God provides social workers with some kind of special protection because as we mulled over our limited options, a little Italian “nona” appeared who was to rescue us from the mean streets of Florence.  I can’t tell you her name or how we met her, to protect her identity, but she just happened to have a recently remodeled apartment that heretofore only her relatives were permitted to use.  It was very clean, bright, well located and cheap, um, relatively cheap.  Nothing is cheap in Florence. 

See our Florence Apartment in this video

Anyway, our little angel of mercy let us have this great apartment for our entire nine-day stay.  She and her husband were wonderful.  We spoke very little Italian, and they spoke very little English, but we got along so well that it was all hugs and kisses when we left.  These Italians are fine people.  (The two people at italy-accom.com were not Italians: the owner of the apartment was an American and the agent was a Brit.)

So there’s a moral to this story.  First, avoid this agency unless you are a VERY lucky person.  Second, always have a backup plan.  It’s not that something might go wrong, something WILL go wrong.  Before you leave your little nest at home, make sure you have alternate emergency accommodations figured out, know where critical services are located like an English-speaking hospital, American embassy (not that they’ll do much for you), and have a WiFi-capable computer or cell phone with you, both if possible. 

I’m glad we treated the Italians well after WWII.  Those of you who don’t remember should know that Italy was an Axis power on the side of Germany during the war.  I can’t help but believe that some of the kindness shown to us by these older Italians had something to do with their good memories of Americans after the war.  They never talked about it, but I think so.

By the way, everyone over here dislikes George Bush.  I think I could live here. 

Dateline: Roma!

The flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport arrived an hour early due to a tailwind that reached 184 mph over the north Atlantic.  At one point, our ground speed was 720 mph—not too shabby.  It felt like we were on a rocket.  Unfortunately, the same winds that blew us across the Atlantic created havoc with flights leaving Amsterdam, and we were delayed four hours on the flight to Rome. 

But not a big deal.  We arrived in Rome around 5 PM and took a taxi to our apartment.   It was a long day of flying, but we quickly took an inventory of needed kitchen supplies and food for the first couple of days and headed for the nearest supermarket about three blocks from here.  It’s not exactly a “super” market in the sense of being gigantic, but it had pretty much all we needed.  With packaging very different and labels in Italian, it took some time to figure out the difference between, for instance, dish-washing liquid and liquid hand soap.  And grocery stores are not laid out like in the U.S.  Eggs are not refrigerated here, so you won’t usually find them near the dairy case.  And paper products are very costly in Europe.  They don’t have the kinds of forests and a paper industry the size of ours.  As a result packages of paper towels, napkins, etc. are of modest size, and these products are not wasted.  We Americans will grind through a roll of paper towels in a heart beat.  Not here.   It’s a great reminder to me that there is not an inexhaustible supply of trees and paper products in the world and we shouldn’t waste so much.

As I thought back on the day, the most satisfying part of the trip was the two couples we met during the delay at Schiphol Airport.  They are Dutch and were on our flight to Rome.  One was celebrating a birthday and the other was a recently retired couple trying to see a little more of the world.  It’s amazing how open these people are about their lives—how they live and what they believe.  They are also well traveled, well educated and very much up on what is happening in the U.S. 

But it was the simplicity of their lives and the joy they took in it that so impressed me. 

One couple drove a small Opel and lived in a house that sounded not much bigger.  She takes her bike to and from work, about six miles each day, and does it both for the exercise and to put less carbon into the air.  She said she knew her little car was not putting that big of a dent in the ozone layer, but she wanted to do her part.  She has a vegetable and fruit chart on her refrigerator so she can buy these things only when they’re in season; she doesn’t want more fuel used to bring produce to her from afar. 

These people are amazing and humbling to talk to—such a sense of community and personal responsibility!  I was embarrassed to tell her we drove two cars that swallowed up about three times as much gas as she and her husband were using.

I’m sure these folks have their own struggles, disappointments and challenges as we all do.  But they seemed so at peace with their lives.  It’s not that the Dutch have everything right and we Americans have it all wrong.   We do some things pretty darn well ourselves.  But I couldn’t help but admire the kinds of lives they seemed to lead and the values they shared.  They were very polite about it, but they looked dismayed and almost embarrassed for us about what was happening to our country.   It seemed as though they were talking about a dear friend who had inexplicably gone mad.

I started out less than happy about the four-hour delay, but it ended up being the best part of the day.  In fact, often the best part of traveling is the people we meet along the way.  There is a certain camaraderie and anonymity when traveling that invites people to share things about themselves they might not otherwise share.  It’s quite a gift we strangers can give to one another.