Bad Samaritans Abroad

by snaggle at 07:55 AM on September 29, 2003

So this time there’s a valid reason that I haven’t written: I’m in Rome. From August 16th until September 5th, I was tromping around Europe with five others before starting my semester abroad here in Rome. It was a fantastic experience; I had the pleasure of being tour guide and translator for everyone as we traveled, since I’m a polyglot and have been to Europe a couple times before. (You can check out some photos on my personal site.) Now things are settling down and I’m just enjoying the relatively lower-stress semester abroad.

Yesterday provided a good reason for me to write and let you know that I’m still alive. If you’ve heard the news lately, Rome followed suit with New York and London and proceeded to have a massive blackout. Of course, this one wasn’t just Rome – it was all of Italy. We had just gotten back from a trip to the south of Italy and as we came into Rome, the entire town was lit up, festive, and drunk. It was the Notte Bianca, an all-night festival of sorts. So of course on the day that places had planned on being open until dawn, the power proceeds to go out at 3:30 AM. I was already in bed, but some of my friends were out at the bars and such. The mass chaos that proceeded to ensue wasn’t as bad as could have happened, apparently, though still crazy. When I woke up at about noon on Sunday morning, we discovered that we had no electricity. After a futile attempt at fussing with the circuit breakers, I guessed that the power had to be out for more than just us, so I went back to sleep to await the return of power.

Now the funny thing is that on our whirlwind backpacking experience across most of western Europe, we had managed to be in London during their blackout, though we didn’t really notice it. We had attempted to get on the Tube, but we were told that there was a problem and couldn’t get on. (A fortunate thing, since some other people I know were stuck in a cramped subway car for a few hours.) And, my friend Chris was in New York a few days before that outage. Hm. Interesting.

So anyway, I’ll try to give you little tidbits from Rome now and then. Take care of the U.S. for me.