So I’m on the plane. Suddenly, this al-Qaeda motherfucker starts pulling some shit…long story short, I land the plane while covered in blood that don’t belong to me. Seriously though, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve flown anymore, but I’m starting to HATE that shit. I think its cause of Lost. I realize that subconsciously, all the songs I listen to on the plane involve me thinking “this would be OK to crash to.” Sheeeeeit. Anyways, so land in Bologna, and start looking for a bathroom to wash my hands. I forgot to mention, that since I didn’t exactly have a real place to stay in Tuebingen, I didn’t bother buying any products like soap. So that entire weekend, when I wanted to wash my hands, I’d have to go bug Carie upstairs. Also, I spent a long time looking for cough drops at the airport, something which would mark the entire time in Florence. Eventually I, again, physically jam as the last possible person onto a bus to Bologna’s main station. Every time the doors open or close I have to maneuver my big back pack so that the shits didn’t slingshot me. Not much happens in the interim: get to the station, get a ticket for Florence, and then go there.
Ben told me to meet him near the MickeyD’s, which is good because whenever I see one, I go to it anyways to get a McRib. I searched for a while, and then I saw him: he was wearing a periwinkle blue polo, and was listening to Interpol on his iPod. He had not shaven. We exchanged polite smiles. Then as we were walking towards his apartment I saw a bizarre fountain/cascade/pit near the train station. “I mean, whaddaya whaddaya coll dis whaddaya coll dis ting he’?” I asked. He did’t know.
Ben lives in a pretty jive part of Florence on the 1st floor with about 15 (right?) other dudes. His room is fucking gigantic but he splits it with two other guys. I took a shower n’ dat and then we started going on a walking tour…and to get sandwiches. The weather was real nice finally, and there were tons of fuckers out on the street. Little did I know, that this would be the least crowded day in Florence. All along we heard a lot of people speaking American English, something which I wasn’t as used to. I guess it’s a mix between the tourists and the students – there’s tons of each. So walking through some markets selling pirated shirts and purses and shit, I see this girl who turns out to be my kid sister. I knew she was in Florence on a High School exchange, and she had my number, but I wasn’t sure when she’d call or whatever. This meeting in the middle of a busy Florentine plaza remedied that uncertainty. So me and Ben keep going, go to the “Oil Shoppe” to get some sandwiches. They were good, but Ben said “its kind of dry today.” I think he just wanted me to be blown away like, “if its THIS good when its dry, then….” We went shopping for groceries…and if I remember correctly, we did NOT stop laughing the entire time we were in there. Shit like, “you like bananaz? Naw, the’re good…potassium.” It’s all in this fucking Voice…ALL of it. Ben’s Martha Stewart ass has some Minestrone he wanted to make so we had to load up on ingredients for that.
We carried all this shit back to his place, I bought some beer and helped chop onions. The soup, in the end, was pretty good. Ben’s friend Ana came and we yukked around for a while laughing. Some of Ben’s floor mates hung out in the kitchen, and they…are…AWFUL. Me and Ana just kind of stared in awe at the idiocy of conversation. Ben has the fortune of living with the only other two cool guys on the floor. I even had to interrupt what was the most ignorant political statement about how the Germans are the only ones in Europe doing well. Shaw RIGHT… Later in the evening Ben and I took off to have some pints at a bar. We got there and had some fucking rich creamy shit that was something like 12% alcohol. In a bit, Aynsley, Anna, and Mrs. Lynn showed up and that got to be HILARIOUS. Mrs. Lynn told us about her college days while Aynsley practically wept “moOOOoOoOOOM!” After a while, Ben’s good friend Emily came by and we left the bar to go to some club called YAB. Young and Beautiful, I believe? It was awful. I mean, as a club it was nice I guess. But me and Ben instantly got separated from the others while trying to get drinks. We spent about 10-15 minutes, holding our coats the entire time, walking around trying to find our friends. Finally I spot them in a corner beyond a velvet rope…and so I’m thinking, well I’m IN the club, the rope is probably just there for aesthetic reasons. So I hop it. Ben meanwhile, prudently goes around. I put my jacket down and start talking to some people and I turn to see that Ben is getting hassled by some bouncer. I walk over there to be like “he’s with me” (right..) still not realizing that I had busted into some VIP area. So the bouncer grabs my ass too and I start getting angry…because I HATE fucking bouncers. (See the blog about the time in Heilbronn) I’m trying to push past him to at least get my coat yelling “my fucking jacket…my fucking jacket.” The girls are like trying to get this guy to let me and Ben in, telling him how charming and likable we are…but he’s not having it. Finally I get to my coat and as I’m walking out he starts doing the hand-on-the-shoulder escort, to which I do the violent shoulder “get the fuck off me” thing….I know that type of shit gets you headbutted in a lot of places but fuck…I hate those guys.
We had to pay like 8 Euros to get out…what kind of shit is that? An exit fee…stoopit. And as we were walking, we saw bouncers chasing some fucker around. I hate YAB. Ben was so angry that as he tried to ash a cigarette, he broke off the filter. YIKES. When we got back it was pretty late, so I grabbed the ol’ sleeping bag and took it to this disgusting lounge with no windows and a resiny bowl lying around. When I woke up in the morning, I was as sick as ever, I had a terrible terrible headache, and I was in total darkness. I had no idea where I was or what time it was. One of my socks was gone. Where’s my cellphone? I don’t know. My feet are up on the armrests. And at this point I definitively decided that after Florence I would go to Bosnia just to live it up and get pampered by grandma until classes started. Ben had a headache too but after a while we started walking uphill to the NYU campus. Its just on the outskirts of the city and its fucking gorgeous. It’s in this valley and the school is two villas on opposite sides of the valley. In between there’s grapevines and trees. While he had class I sat around drinking coffee doing some work and reading under like…an olive tree. It was dope. I also planned on meeting with Sabina later.
After these cool kids got done with class, we strolled back and met my sister and her friend and Emily took us to another “more authentic” sandwich shop in this passageway where some winos were clowning around. So a few of us are sitting down and Natalie just casually on a jog runs by. Florence sometimes felt like going to an American university on a really exotic campus, and a lot of Italian exchange students. (Excluding the overload of masterpieces and marginalized African immigrants getting arrested) After a while, I walked my sister and co. towards the train station because they stay with guest families in a suburb. After that I hiked up past the other side of the river - kind of getting a feel for the less tourist-ridden areas and then rested in a park where I talked to this guy (pic below) in German for a while.
I started trying to find my way back to Ben’s, and got it to the general area but then got fucking mad confused – probably because I didn’t know the number, or the street. I kept making the same wrong turn over and over again and pretty soon it was getting dark, and I had no more minutes and I knew that Ben didn’t either so he wasn’t about to give a concerned call out. I did some strategic SMSing and managed to get his address, but the numbering system took me a sec to figure out. Just as I find his door and get upstairs, this clown sends me an SMS saying he’s at the Kebab joint (which I had used as a landmark earlier). My B, Ben. He comes back, and as a favor, I run to the store to get some ingredients. Ben plans on making a big dinner bash on this night with like 5 courses. Natalie shows up too and the three of us start helping prepare…I made the mashed potatoes. It was pretty cool…there were about 15 or so people, and the eats were very good. Props to Ben.
After Emily absolutely drowned in wine and got written on, the rest of us took off in a group. Two blocks later, everyone had gotten separated and Ben, Natalie, and I, went to this trendy bar to meet with Morgan and Elyse. We hung out there telling jokes and stories for a little bit, but I think most of us were violently tired. We didn’t stay very long. When we got back, Emily was sleeping on Ben’s bed, and we woke her up so that I could sleep there instead. How’s that shit…Ben is a good friend. The next day I had to start doing tourist shit, visiting museums and the like. I did some quick research and started on my mission. I first tried to stop by the Academy where the David is, hoping that maybe the line would be small. PSYCH. The shit was around the block. Coincidentally and wonderfully though, my visit overlapped with like Italian Culture Week so all the entrances were free. I went a little further to visit a sculpture museum, then went into the Duomo, the gigantic Cathedral which is the center of Florence, and then finally made it to the Academy. I took my time going through it because, to be honest, I wasn’t too hyped to see David. I always thought, I’4ve seen pictures of the fool a thousand times and blah blah blah. But then you actually see the guy, and its actually really something. Its much bigger than I thought and also, he winked at me.
When I got back I had to mull around for Ben to show up. Then he did. So we mulled around some more. In this down time I chatted with his roommates. They were having some political problems at the time – namely, like the Hall Director had received complaints about the mess in the kitchen (it was terrible) and some people had given out names, PLUS the names of people smoking weed on the floor. So there was like some McCarthy type shit going on when I got there to discover who the snitches were. Get this, one of the roommates, I forget the name, was out in the hall, with a fucking red candle, plastic chains circling the candle, and going through a book of spells to place a curse on the rats. And get this part, HE WAS NOT JOKING. The other day he was giving a Tarot card reading to some chick who was totally into it. And he said something like “you will experience stress from financial problems.” And I was like…uhh right, kind of like, say, every fucking human being that walks the earth?
We had made plans to go to some restaurant for dinner with like 30 people. Naturally, we were going to be fashionably late, but when we accidentally stretched into offensively late, we ended up sitting in the nosebleed section. Literally, next to some high school kids who were visiting their siblings. After the dinner we managed it to this pretty cool club where we hung out yakking for quite a bit. Things took a turn for the creepy where this lecherous old man started talking to us. Everybody thought he was really interesting and he insisted he was a professor of Philosophy…but what professor doesn’t speak English? He struggled to say Existentialism and everyone’s like “Camus?” And he’s like “SI SI SI! CAMUS!...KEROUAC!” Emily even offered to give him a hug, and THEN HE FUCKING FRENCH KISSED HER. Everyone was totally shocked to even react and she nearly wept, rightfully so. The man reeked of like…radish brandy (does that exist?). And he just kept yakking. Playa.
People got wasted. Emily wanted to meet with some friends from New York who had shown up unexpectedly. So she orders a cab and we’re outside waiting for it. Meanwhile, she drops her phone and then starts freaking out that its not working. Turns out, the fucking battery is gone. Where did she drop it? Nobody knows. I’m trying to catch this cab so I’m on my stomach like an animal, rolling underneath Renaults and Peugeots and shit, using the light from my cellphone like a coal miner from the future trying to find it. It doesn’t help that its from that Razor shit, so its basically a credit card. First cab rolls up, waits, bounces. People start getting frustrated. I’ve moved on to scanning the gutter. Finally she finds it in the bathroom and we get a second cab in action. We drive back to the other side of the river and met her friends, two chicks hanging out with some cat Dave. They’re leaving this one bar, and on their way to some “private club.” Next door. Basically its private because you have to ring a doorbell and get buzzed in…inside its determined whether you’re cool enough through monitors. But EVERYONE got buzzed in, and all you need to do is pay a one time 3 Euro cover for a little piece of paper, sign in, and then I guess you’re in the In-Crowd now…according to this place’s standards anyway. Ben, meanwhile, isn’t going to stay because he’s low on loot and has to prepare for a presentation for tomorrow. So I stick around with Emily and her friends and order some fairly pricy drinks…no later do we do that, Emily starts wanting to leave and go somewhere else. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, this place could start burning to the ground or the barkeep here could lose his shit and start blowing people away, and I’m still going to sit here patiently and finish this 7 Euro drink. So Emily leaves, and now its just me and her two friends. Okaaaaay. Thankfully, they were affable and jokes were made. We stuck around maybe another 45 minutes or so, but by then it was already around 3AM. We slowly made zig-zagged our way towards the Duomo where we split up. The entire time we tried to remember who the third Pokemon was with the Char prefix. Here’s some girl in like a Chanel dress getting frustrated and yelling “Charmander was ONE…Charizard was the NEXT LEVEL.” That isn’t to say I wasn’t getting angry either. Now I’ll admit it if I was a Pokemon fan, god knows I used to be into some stoopit shit…but Pokemon never did it for me. That being said, I KNEW I knew the name of that motherfucker. I knew it was logical…all of them have reptilian/cold-blooded name schemes. I was insisting on Charosaur for a while…then it struck me…Gecko, no. Horny Toad, no. Chameleon? Fuck YEAH. Charmeleon. Boom.
I got to Ben’s place, rang the doorbell and got buzzed in. As I was climbing up the stairs, Ben’s head popped out of the door and breathed out a sigh of relief. He said Em called, clearly not with the group, and he said “Where the fuck is Malik??” I guess he thinks I’m OK. More likely though, he didn’t want to identify my corpse pulled from the river.
The next morning, I had to say goodbye to Ben. He and some other kids were going to Ireland. I was going to spend this one last night in Florence and then the next day trek over to the Balkans. I woke up fairly early and spend a while buying tickets for the trip at the train station and was super-late on meeting Elyse for coffee. I walked her to the train station and met with Anna and waved them goodbye as they went to Rome or something. On this particular day, I was again going to see some tourist shit again, primarily the big museum, the Uffizi, and meet my Kid Sister again for lunch. So first I got confused and end up waiting for my sister two hours earlier than scheduled. I realized my folly, and decided I should go to a museum…which closed while I was waiting. So instead I just said fuck it, I’ll kill an hour in a bookstore, and started walking. No sooner did I start walking, a thunderstorm broke out nearby. Really loud thunder starts making people a little shifty on the street. Then a light drizzle, then a medium drizzle, then its fucking pouring and thundering like crazy. The rain is SO thick in fact, that soon it opts to take it up a notch and turn into hail pellets. All of us on the street became friends and shit hiding out underneath various overhangs.
I met my sister about an hour later and we had some pizza n’ shit, walked around town, made fun of mom and dad, and talked about Squabbits (my sister thinks there’s a hybrid squirrel/rabbit species that lives in our backyard and, indeed, has a fuzzy cellphone picture that is surely to become the stuff of myth ala Lockness and Big Foot.) The rest of the afternoon I spent at the museum to look at pretty pictures. A lot of them were about Jesus. I saw a picture of Jesus and John the Baptist as babies…even as a toddler, apparently, JB rocked the fur toga and staff.
When I got back to Ben’s place, I bought his roommates some brewskis on account of them being cool with some kid crashing in their room. Then I went to Maggie’s cuz word on the street had it her and her roommates Emma and Macy were making some stir-fry. I ate that shit and then things started to get a little out of hand with the wine. Several bottles later, they had convinced me to get out of the bed I had claimed, disassemble it, throw it into a room with two other beds to put them together, and have a “big slumber party.” It was definitely fun, but there was a problem in that another roommate was trying to sleep for class the next day, and we were simply screaming and laughing at nothing at all. Emma, in particular, has a laugh that is up there with mine that is more just a screech than anything resembling human laughter. She’d go “NoNoNo Don’t get me started!! Don’t get me starrrRRRreeeeeeeaAAhHHAHHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!” The fourth roommate got fucking super pissed. I tried to apologize in the morning, but she wasn’t having it.
We met up with Morgan later the next day and I went to quickly pack my shit together to get ready for my train later in the afternoon. That proved nearly terrifying as I couldn’t get anyone to buzz me up for about 20 mins…everyone’s all sleeping and shit. Finally I just went overboard with the buzzer and wore out my welcome that way. Then me, Morgan, and Maggie went to the Cathedral where all the big players like Mike Angelo and Dante “D-Ant” Alighieri are buried. There was a nice plaza and the day was maahvulous for sitting in the sun. Finally we hustled back, I strapped my life on my back again, and took off for the train station. We said tearful goodbyes and I boarded the train with an ice cream cone dripping everywhere. I didn’t try to claim my seat till I ate it and everyone was looking at me thinking “you fat prick.” Some jerk was in my seat so I had to wake him up. I sat down and watched movies until the train pulled into Venice Station. There I just checked my luggage in and decided to walk around the area. This wasn’t the romantic part of Venice. It was shady and I walked for about half a kilometer when I realized I wasn’t going to make it to Piazza San Marco to play with the fucking pigeons and that either way, getting stabbed and having my laptop taken wasn’t worth the fun. I had a shit Italian beer until a rickety Hungarian train that was to take me as far as Croatia came up. I boarded…
Coming up next, Act III
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