I think I've finally figured out what time it is. For much of the past week, my internal clock has been convinced that it's 5-7 hours later than it actually is, which led to me going to bed by 8:00 and waking up at 3:30 or so, unable to go back to sleep. Last night I managed to stay up until 10:00, and didn't wake up this morning until 6:15, in the midst of a very odd dream. (I was in Estonia, the Russians were invading, and it was VERY IMPORTANT that I serve pancakes to some people I'd never met.)
Anyway, on 28 December, 15 hardy souls loaded up on the church bus at 3:45 AM to head for Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Our objective? Fly to Rome, meet some refugees (Iranian, if past experience was to be our guide¹), supply them with food, sleeping bags and warm clothes, do some evangelism, and come home.
Along the way, we stopped in Norman to pick up a friend of my Dad's, a professor of French at OBU, one Hossein Kalami, who has the advantage over us in that he speaks Farsi, what with being originally from Tehran and all. We found Hossein's house, (after driving the bus through some very narrow streets which were clearly Not Meant For Driving Buses Down - ironically, this was next to a school) and continued south towards Dallas.
We arrived in Dallas, went through the usual security stuff, and got all checked in. Then? We waited. We had allowed plenty of time for things to go wrong, and nothing did. So we sat around the airport until they called our flight. As would become a theme for the trip, auntlada and the rest of the group boarded before me (you know how they break the seats down into Zones 1-5 and call boarding by zones? My seat - right next to auntlada, who was in Zone 2 - was in Zone 5) so I got to stand around until the last minute before getting on board. We arrived early in Philadelphia so we had 3.5 hours to kill, which was a Good Thing, because many of us were hungry, so we had lots of time to eat in the food court at the Philly airport. (Which, unaccountably, does not feature cheese steaks
anywhere.) After a bit, auntlada and I decided to head down to our gate; 20 minutes and 4 moving sidewalks later, we were finally there - it seems that the domestic terminals at the Philly airport are actually in Pittsburgh, so it takes a bit. The rest of our group finally straggled in. We had to get our boarding passes stamped at the gate; I noticed that my new boarding pass indicated that my seat - right next to auntlada, who was in Zone 3 - was in
Zone 8, this time. As near as I can tell, I was the only one in Zone 8, and let me tell you, the food there isn't nearly as good as Zone 3. Anyway, we took off, and in a twinkling - or 8.5 hours - we were landing in Rome at the airport that is either named "Leonardo da Vinci" or "Fiumicino²", depending on which billboard you look at.
We got through customs, got our luggage and met up with our contact, Tim, an IMB missionary in Rome. Tim is not supposed to help refugees but does so anyway; I like that in a person. We had planned for Tim to put as much of our luggage in his car as possible and drive it to the apartments we'd rented while we took the subway, but some guys who run a mini-van taxi business there made us an offer we couldn't refuse, so we crammed into two vans and headed off for Trastevere, the area of Rome that we would call home for the next week.
I had heard all about Italian drivers, and had taken the stories with a grain of salt. Sure, I thought, they're probably a little wild if you're one of these provincial Americans who've never seen a "
Taxi-brousse" and who don't even know where to find the "Third-World Brake Pedal." (It's the round button in the center of your steering wheel.) I could see where our church people might be a bit disconcerted, but I've ridden taxis in Abidjan, and Accra, and Lomé. I was prepared for it.
Or so I thought. It turns out that Italians do drive much like West Africans, regarding signs and lane markers and even construction fences as gentle suggestions, to be followed or not at the driver's whim. What I had neglected in my calculus of driving was the roads in Rome. The Romans have a 2000 year old tradition of building good roads, and so Italian drivers drive like West African drivers at six times the speed. In Togo, you can't do that; after a (very) short while the suspension (at least) of your vehicle will cease to exist as a coherent unit and then you'll be forced to slow down, if for no other reason than to remove the shock absorber from your kidneys. Our mini-van drivers had no worries of such a thing happening, and so they went this way and that at speeds approaching Warp 7 (I was in front, so I could see the speedometer) and - much sooner than I would have liked - we were in Trastevere.
Here we slowed down. Trastevere was built up in the Middle Ages, and the streets are narrow. In the 18th Century the government forced the Trasteverians to remove the decorative bits from the front of their buildings so that carriages could go down the streets, but the streets are still narrow. And winding. And cobbled. And many of them are one-way, going the other direction, and oh my GOSH we're going to head on a car full of nuns!
We didn't, but we did have to back out and wait while our driver rolled down his window so that Sister Mary Macaroni could rap his knuckles with a ruler. Eventually, we got to our apartment, where we found a distinct hole in the air, a hole that was the size and shape of the guy from the apartment rental place who was to let us in. So we stood in the street for a bit, until eventually the hole was filled and we could take our luggage up to the fourth floor. Up the stairs to the fourth floor. Up the slick marble 67 flights of stairs we went, until we found ourselves in our apartment. "It's not quite ready yet," said Enzo (for that was his name) "but cleaning lady will come soon." (This was at 10:00 AM.) Not quite ready appeared to mean that the beds had no linens, that there was a large pile of damp towels outside the bathroom, and that the former resident's food was still in the refrigerator. At this point, the charm of Italy was somewhat lost on me, although it came back later.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
¹ Relying on past experience is a fatal flaw when it comes to mission trips, but we don't generally let that stop us.
² It is my cherished belief that "Fiumicino" means "Smoky Pants" in Italian. Please do not correct me.
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