The first time I was in Europe, I spent most of my time in France. Paris, actually. I did get in some day trips to Versailles and Chartres and had a short trip to Bretagn, but Paris was where I lived for four weeks. Before returning to the states, I bought a train pass and spent the final 2 weeks of my trip in Italy.

Italy was marvelous. By the time I left France, I was already feeling a bit too comfortable. In my time in France, I had already slipped into a safe complacency. I just ‘fit’ in France somehow. Paris, specifically. So I was surprised by the look on my friend’s faces when I got on the train at the Gare de Lyon. They looked scared, worried, excited, all at once. They didn’t have those looks on their faces ever before. There was an uncomfortable silence as we walked down the car, looking for my couchette. I asked what was wrong and Massy said, “You’re going to Rome. By yourself…”

I tucked my suitcase under the seat and sat on my coat. My couchette-mates were a short Italian woman with a 1970s perm who spoke broken english and a bit of French, and a couple from Serbia who clung to each other and stared morosely at us from the other seat in the car. The Italian woman kept singing “couchette – ta” over and over as the train lurched out of the station.

The first thing I saw in Rome was a line of boys between the ages of about 8 and 13 being led away by the polizia. There were a couple of  polizia at the front of the line, and a couple more at the back. One of the polizia dangled about a dozen miss-matched shoes from his night stick, tied together with their own shoelaces. That’s when I realized the line of boys all had shoes on one foot, and the other was bare.  My first day in Rome and the cops were rounding up gypsies.

I met Arthur my second night in Rome on the roof of my pensione. I had a cheap room and wasn’t supposed to be up there (the roof was a garden for people with higher-priced rooms), but that’s where the ice machine was, so, being American I went up to steal ice.  I waited until the old lady who guarded the roof went to the bagno. I snuck over to the ice machine to fill a makeshift bucket, when a male voice called over to me in Italian. I blurted out, “Je suis americanne, je ne comprends rien!” He burst out laughing and invited me over to his table in perfect English. He was from Amsterdam, spoke 5 languages fluently, and I spent the rest of my time in Rome on the nice side of the pensione.

Arthur changed his plans and accompanyed me to Florence for one day. He almost talked me out of going to Florence; he didn’t care for it, and I have to agree. Especially after he left, and I moved to the cheap pensione with the bed bugs. Rome was dirty and crazy and really hard to cross the streets, but I loved it. During the day, I played tourist while Arthur worked on a youth symphony tour. On my travels, I looked for old ladies, figuring that if the old ladies were still alive they knew how to cross the street, so if I crossed the street with them, I wouldn’t get run over and die. The day I spent in the Vatican, four different guys named Marco from four different parts of the complex offered to give me private tours. At night, Arthur and I went to the most amazing, small restaurants I’ve ever eaten in. Rome was nuts on steroids. Florence just felt touristy. With bed bugs.

I left for Assisi a day early. While there, I realized they knew more about dealing with crazy tourists than any place I’ve ever seen. This small village in the Italian mountains allowed only a few cars and small trucks onto its roads. In the morning, busloads of old French or Spanish or Italian ladies would travel up the mountain to visit the San Francesco basilica. It felt like tourists had been invading this town for 400 years, and all the while, the natives just shrugged, pushed another stone out of the wall and had another glass of wine.

One day while I was walking down a little stone road, I accidentally wandered into a private garden. I turned a corner and I found myself surrounded by a group of monks from all over the world. One blurted out something in Italian, another one said something that sounded like German. I responded in my bad French and one of the monks shot up and grabbed my hand, and spoke rapidly in French. He was from Africa, and his primary European language was French. With me in the group, speaking Engish and French, I could translate for  him. We drank wine and ate cheese and olives and bread until evening, when the monks went to pray.

The Italian trains were as advertised. Rarely on schedule, often on strike, and thoroughly confusing. I had planned my trip while still in France, and only gave myself one day in Milan. I had planned for my train to arrive in the morning, giving me plenty of time to run over to view Da Vinci’s Last Supper, run back to the station and get on the evening Eurostar to Paris. Then I met the Italian trains. Not only did I land in Milano Porta Garibaldi  4 hours late (almost too late to see the mural if the trains were running on time), but the station was in utter chaos. People from all over Europe were gesturing wildly, speaking in every language on the continent, with line after line of people waiting for trains, some pushing, some shoving, trying anything they could to get out. This was the biggest train strike I’d ever experienced. I stood in a line for hours. Finally I got near a window, hungry, tired, and really needing the bagno. A woman sat behind the glass, chain smoking and flipping the pages of Il Treno, the national train schedule. Every once in a while she’d shake her head and yell, “successivo”. If the person she’d given the bad news to was Italian, they’d start yelling at her. If they were from anywhere else, they’d look up with an expression of someone who’d landed on a distant planet. Mouth slightly open, eyes wide in disbelief, fear and trembling in their shuffling walk away from the window. When I got to the glass and showed her a first class Euro Rail pass to France, she waved in a general direction. I went that way, and suddenly people were running. I ran too. Pushing, shoving, chaos, and once again, the first-class pass got me on the train. At one point, some crazed eastern european woman tried to rip it out of my hand, but I got onto the train.

I had paid for a couchette, but I didn’t care that they were all full. I was on a train, headed for Paris. My flight back to America was in two days, and I had to get back to Paris to say goodbye and pack. I was tired, hungry, thirsty, and after a brief wait, I finally got into the toilette. In the dining car I had an orangina and some awful train sandwich, the only food I’d had all day. Once a seat opened up I slept there until a porter woke me and said, in merciful French, that I had to find a seat in another car. I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the dining car when people wanted to eat. I wandered the aisles for a bit. Some poor guy left his seat to use the toilette, and I sat down and went to sleep.

I arrived in Paris in the early morning. My friends weren’t sure when I was landing, so they were at home, waiting for me to call. The train arrived shortly after dawn, and I didn’t want to wake them up. I decided to walk to the apartment unannounced. The light sparkled on the city. I stopped and had a café crème and croissant before walking along the Quai Henri IV,  to the Pont du Sully, to the apartment on the left bank. Crossing the bridge over the Seine, I had a feeling that I hadn’t experienced since I was a very little girl.

I was home.

-Mari Hulick