Travel Archives ’06: Rome, or, The Lost Story of How I Almost Didn’t Make It To Tokyo (Part II)

While Rome itself can be a very captivating place to visit, overall I found it difficult to really develop a connection with it. I think part of this was due to the fact that I was overcome by frustration at every turn, whether it was the inadequacy of transit, throngs of Aryan youth, or the fact that you’d have to walk twenty blocks from major tourist attractions to get a decent price on a bottle of water. I felt detached from any sense of actual culture and anything remotely what one would consider Italian; in fact, apart from the very presence of the ancient ruins themselves, Rome could have been any city in any part of the world. I mean really, I can get better Italian food at home, and for much less.

However, on my last night in Rome, I had finally found what I’d been looking for all along: a bustling neighbourhood lined with cobblestone roads, narrow, winding alleyways, vespas, accordion music filling the air, and small cafes and shops lining the streets. This was the Rome I’d been looking for; a chance to see how people in the city really lived, rather than how they exploited tourists and took advantage of their naivete. As I sat outside, listening to the sweet serenade of a Roman balladeer, sipping my wine and treating myself to a full course meal (the best I’d had in all of Italy), I felt a pleasant calm overcome me, releasing the anxiety that had built up over the course of the past few days.

And that’s when everything fell apart.

The day I was to leave Rome, I woke up early to catch a series of busses to get the airport located on the far reaches of the city. My flight was to leave some time in the late morning, taking me to London where I would stay overnight and leave the following day for Tokyo. I arrived at the airport with hours to spare, which worked out in my favour since they seemed to have a single check-in agent for each of the flights departing that morning. After standing in line with maybe seven people in front of me for an entire hour, I arrived at the ticket counter and enthusiastically handed over my passport and e-ticket, grateful that the end was in sight and the I would be boarding the plane promptly. The check-in agent looked up at me and asked, “What happened to your passport?”

Rewind to a few days earlier, when in the process of doing my laundry, I had realized in midst rinse cycle, that I had left my passport in the pocket of one of my shorts. Apparently passports don’t have the same durability as Canadian currency or balls of lint. The result was a damp, severely mangled travel document that looked as if it had been used for a dog’s chew toy. While the laminated front page with my picture and information was still intact and visible, many of the pages were still stuck together despite my efforts to dry it off, and the bar code at the bottom of the photo page was largely unreadable, which I was to learn a little later was not a good thing.

She didn’t seem overly concerned with the state of my passport, but after a few minutes of perplexed staring back and forth from her computer to my papers, she took out a pen and circled the date on my ticket and handed it back to me. I looked at the ticket, not fully understanding at first the second of two grievous errors I had made in the past few days, the first of course being the passport, the second being the fact that I had shown up for my flight from Rome to London a day late. I took out my ticket information for my flight to Tokyo, and sure enough, I was to leave that very day from Heathrow Airport. Feeling a wave of panic overcome me, I was informed that a flight to London was leaving at the same time as the flight I was supposed to have taken the previous day, which would give me about two hours to get from Lutin Airport to Heathrow in order to catch my flight. It was a stretch, but it could be done.

To be continued…