You may have heard me mention my roommate Emily Tuttle in the past. We have been friends since freshmen year of college and, needless to say, have shared many adventures during this time. However, perhaps our biggest and most exciting adventure took place in Rome, Italy last semester when we faced the very real possibility of homelessness for the first time. Let me take you back to February 24th, 2012:
Emily and I had just arrived in Rome around 8:00pm. Given that we had recently developed an obsession with the Mona Lisa after seeing her at the Lourve in Paris, we had booked two beds at the Mona Lisa Hostel in Rome for the weekend. Anyway, we were in a little bit of a hurry to get to our hostel because we were planning on meeting my friend there at 9:00pm (she was studying in Rome for the semester). So, we started walking from the train station, following the map we had printed out with ease. We found the narrow backstreet on which our hostel supposedly sat, and...it was no where to be found. We walked up and down the entire street again. No Mona. At this point we began frantically walking and yelling perhaps our favorite phrase that does not originate from The Princess Diaries: "WHERE YOU BE HIDIN' MONA?!" Mona did not respond. We wandered back to a main street to see if someone could help us (of course, the only italian words I know are musical terms, and I was pretty sure the word "arpeggio" wouldn't help us in this situation). Then we saw some taxis and thought that perhaps they had GPS and could direct us if we showed a driver the address. This seemed like a brilliant enough idea until a taxi driver told us that the Mona Lisa Hostel was Florence rather than Rome. That was a low point. Baffled, we decided to journey back to the street on which the hostel supposedly was one last time before accepting the fact that we might very well be homeless in a foreign country where we don't speak the language and have no cell phones. But, just like she always does, Mona pulled through! There she was hiding in an apartment building with absolutely no indication of her existence on the outside of the building at all. So, we went in, put our stuff down, miraculously found my friend, and were able to enjoy the streets of Rome knowing that we would not be sleeping on them that night.
Fast forward.
Yesterday, Emily and I were faced with the prospect of having no place to live yet again. To make a very long story very short, I have recently decided that Housing and Residence Life is even more useless than Disabilities Services (that's a story for another time, but trust me, I didn't think anything could be worse). Luckily, this time around we are in a city where the majority of people speak English, we have cell phones, and the streets around us are not infested with cats. The only downside? Less gelato and wine to live on if we do have to take to the streets.
Anyway, our situation worked out, and we won't be homeless next year, but my point is this: what would life be without the occasional adventure that has a very real possibility of ending terribly? An adventure during which you are not in control; an instance in which you have to completely surrender to hope and blind faith. That night in Rome was perhaps one of the most stressful nights of my life. Emily and I were both on edge, and neither one of us really had any solution to our problem. But, it was also a beautiful night, we were in Rome for the first time, and we knew that whatever happened would make for a good story one day.
I think it has.
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