Trans - Siberian Part 1 - Rome

Part 1

 

It has been a long assed time. A lot has changed since last year, and in the spirit of change I'm going to begin updating this thing a bit more regularly. But first, something of a special feature, an account of my trip in December.

For my 30th birthday my Mother and Sister banded together to purchase me a flight to Beijing and the Trans Siberian back.  Over the following few days and weeks I will attempt to impart something of the spirit of the thing, for what a thing it was.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, well, most of the world..

So... I'll open with my initial diary entry, it sums it all up quite well I think:

Tuesday  the 4th of December 2012  10:50 Heathrow Airport, Terminal 4, Pret A Manger

For a small time there... well, a long time there, I thought I was immune to the excitement of this trip.  I guess I was wrong.  Clutching my tickets -  London - Rome - Beijing - awakened in me a very specific type of excitement I had not felt in years. Years!

Off I go.  Adventure! Excitement... the World! Wonderful!

I'd be lying if I didn't say I was nervous - but its an excited kind of nervous, the intoxicating kind, and my oh my am I intoxicated!

Welcome, therefore, to what I hope will be a record of one of the more exciting months of my life. So far anyway!

Full throttle it is then! No brakes!!!

So off I went then, on a chilly December morning, into the unknown.  It was a trying time, the morning before, my entire section at work had been fired with no warning, various matters in my life had suddenly boiled to a worrying head, and I was 30, 30! with nothing of substance to my name, and really quite aware and worried about it. Yet here I was, leaving it all behind, traveling halfway across the world on a fool's errand.

One could say there was a lot on my mind.

Rome

 I was to spend a day and a night in Rome on my way out.  With no income, I had decided early on during my Italy bound flight, that I would be sleeping in the airport. Not a problem.

Stazione Termini

Rome. Though I had not set foot in the city for over a decade, held many fond memories, tied up inextricably with my idea of who I am.

It was from Rome I had set out, all those years ago, on my first solo trip, from Stazione Termini, Rome's central train station, a building my airport train was now arriving into.  That trip had opened my eyes to the possibilities of the world, the possibilities of travel, there was a moment, in a courtyard in Venice that changed my very conception of what I could achieve, that made me realize, in a single instant, that I could be any man I wished to be.  That trip and all the trips that followed it are somehow bound up with Romes central station, so  Stazione Termini has, for me, always been hallowed ground.  It is my own personal 'Mecca'  at least where travel is concerned.  The very name electrifies.  Stazione Termini.  Silly isn't it?

It hadn't changed, not one bit.  Still that slightly unrealistically massive  rectangular hall, destination boards clattering their way through every destination in Europe (or so it seemed to a 19 year old version of myself).  I strode through, beaming, and out, down towards the Colosseum and the Forum.

As expected the Colosseum snuck up on me.  You turn a corner, and there it is, at the end of a nondescript road, winking in the floodlights.  The road itself was of course carved out of the hillside.  Rome you see, isn't just sited on 7 hills, it wrestles with them, battles them, it carves its way out of the bump and grind of peninsular Italy.  Cleaving its very will into the landscape, forcing it into some sort of Civilized shape.  Yet its somewhat raw,  convoluted.

The Forum 

The Forum was off limits and mostly dark. I wandered past.  The Palatine Hill looming out of the gloom like the wreck of the Titanic or some half melted ziggurat struck me melancholy.  I wandered up the motorway from the Colosseum to peer across an excavation at these glories of old.  Caput Mundi, the head of the world.  Marble and mud.  How sad, how difficult to grasp it all is.  For our generation Rome is glimpsed through the lens of Hollywood, with American or British accents.  Their Empire seems to Echo the British, not the other way round, it almost seems relatable, contemporary.  Here, in the dark, alone with the view, it all seemed so distant, so foreign, so alien to me.  Rome.  To think all that glory is lost.  Knee deep in mud.  Its hard to get ones head around.

I was tired, and these thoughts struck me clumsily, it was all so unreal and ghostly.  I grasped at feeling, at some sort of fellowship with the marbles below.  I didn't seem to come.

The Pantheon

On I walked, right though to the Pantheon, its my favourite building in the world, I'd felt the same 10 years before.  The size of the space, it somehow gets right into your chest, opens you up to the world.  Opens your core you might say.  The massive dome, still perfect though its 2000 years old.  Amazing, Remarkable, Beautiful, Fantastic, and it just feels like you're looking at the horizon in some vast desert plain, or you're out at sea and theres nothing all around but space, and you feel free and open and with the air, that, all that, but INSIDE. Yeah. Pretty Special.

So on I went, to glance down towards Vatican City, past Castel Saint Angelo, but I was tired from walking, I was missing conversation, I felt like a lost soul, so I found a Pizzeria: Baffettos.  The gruff bearded waiter ignored my order of 7up, brought me a beer instead, and I supped, and tried to write, but couldn't, for every time I took up my pen, in he'd sweep, first with cutlery, then with Pizza, and then writing was pointless for, such Pizza! Stunning! Magnifico! And I was done.

Back to the Airport

Back to the airport. Tired and slightly jaded by the weariness in my feet.  The airport was made mostly of marble, it was mostly closed down.  It was like a thousand airports I'd seen before, though particularly like Madrid, and a passport checking booth in Aquaba. Somehow in my search for somewhere to sleep I passed through security and its accompanying x-ray machines twice.  I found red padded seats and lay on them for hours with others in similar straits.  I say lay, I do not say sleep.  There was little of that to be pried from the hard platform that pretended to cushion me.  At 10 am the next morning a fat man in an ugly blue uniform shooed me away, disabled seating only.  But I had lain enough.

Then, all I had to do was sit about watching Americans misunderstand the airport's restaurant's cashier systems for a few hours before it was all aboard a flight across the world.

I'll pick up the tale next time.