Things Take a Turn for the Worse

Day 4
We're in Rome.  We do stuff, including the buying of popeners and the sending of postcards.  Very chill.  I'm pretty sure we ate gelato.  At least twice.

Day 5
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand.  It all goes to shit.  Definitely the very worst day of the entire trip.  My dad had hired a tour guide for two days.  Day one (day 5 of the trip) was a Vatican Museum/St. Peter's tour in the morning, and a Roman greatest hits in the afternoon.  Day two (day 6 of the trip) was an all-day trip out to Tivoli, for Hadrian's Villa and Villa d'Este.  I, before we even left, decided that S and I wouldn't be doing the afternoon tour on day one.  I've done to death a lot of Rome sites, just because I lived there and then visited with S four years ago.  I wanted to spend the afternoon visiting the places that I used to go all the time as a student in Rome.  But yes, I decided a Vatican museum tour could be very interesting, considering that I was so hung-over during the school's visit 9 years ago that I missed almost everything. 

The instructions were to meet our guide (Mayta) at a cafe across from the museum entrance.  We waited, and a woman approached us and asked my dad if he was the man who was eating his way through Italy.  My dad said no, but I had a horrible moment where I just knew that he was wrong.  This....woman....was our tour guide.  First of all, she was, and this is putting it charitably, mobility-challenged.  She was overweight, and her legs were mottled and stumpy and they didn't work.  Her pace?  Challengely slow.  From the beginning, I could NOT understand how she hoped to walk all over Hadrian's Villa, which is a very sprawling kind of a site.  Secondly, she smelled.  Specifically, her breath smelled.  Because her teeth?  They went every which way, were brown (I mean BROWN), and she was clearly missing a few.  She smelled so bad that I had to get away from her.  I mean, I moved so far away from her that at times I missed what she was saying.  Which was okay.  And this is nitpicking, but her clothes were gross.  Faded dress, that looked dirty, and an exceedingly disgusting black sweater chock-a-block with cat hair.  Also, she had shit in her hair.  I mean, not hair gel, but actual environmental items stuck in her hair.  Nightmare.

So we had no choice, and we toddled over to the entrance, walking slowly slowly slowly the whole time.  She was a bruiser, and I think she was being quite rude to the people at the entrance, and honestly, I think that they were laughing at her, and at us, for being with her.  In the grand scheme of tourist hierarchy, we were the big losers, and let me tell you, other people made that very clear.  It was embarrassing.  So we're walking, slowly, and our first stop is the bathroom.  (Ah, Vatican Museum bathrooms, so nice.)  We finally make it to the courtyard with the pinecone, where they've got the Sistine posters set up, and Mayta begins talking about the whole shabang.  Grudgingly, I'll admit that she seemed to know her stuff, at least as far as the Sistine went.  But annoyingly, she'd sometimes lose her train of thought, right in the middle of it.  And then this would happen:  "So Michaelangelo painted these figures in these positions because....Um......Um.....Um..........Um..............Um.............Um.  Yes, Michaelangelo painted these figures."  I.  Am.  Not.  Joking.  I wanted to slap her, because I thought maybe then she'd be able to remember what the hell it was that she wanted to say.

Never mind.  It took forever, and we finally entered the hallway procession that leads to the chapel.  If you've ever been, you are aware that it is a MOB SCENE, and the best thing to do is to duck into other rooms (because there are some AWESOME pieces of art in other rooms) or just keep moving.  But of course, Mayta couldn't keep moving.  Because she was so challenged, she had to stop every so often, and often that meant twice in one hallway.  She did explain some of the artwork on those walls in the hallways, but we didn't duck into any other rooms, because frankly, there's no way she could withstand all that walking.  (I believe it was at this point that I began trying to express my doubts to my dad--that there was NO WAY IN HELL this woman could lead satisfactory tours of the villas in Tivoli.)  It took us a freaking LONG time to get to the Sistine, which frankly, I saw two other times, and it wasn't that impressive then.  I don't know, it's just not breathtaking like the Pantheon or the Colosseum. 

We leave that, and head into St. Peter's.  Mayta doesn't say jack shit about St. Peter's; I learned tons more with my classes and from f-ing guidebooks, and my dad's wife wants (understandably!) to spend some time in the basilica.  It's her first time there, after all, and though St. Peter's doesn't get me like it used to, I can remember the awe that you feel the first time you walk in.  But Mayta wants us to leave.  M stands her ground, and Mayta says, "Fine, you can have 5 minutes, but we need to leave so I can go to the bathroom."  It was horrifying, and it made me feel very sad inside.  She was clearly a nightmare, and I began to be very, very grateful for the decision I had made weeks before.

Outside the Vatican, S and I declined Mayta's invitation for lunch with them (she wasn't happy to learn we weren't going with them for the afternoon, though I am 100% sure my dad told her we weren't), because we had a date with L'Insalata Ricca and Trastevere.  Walking away, I said to S, "Boy, I'm Speed Racer compared to her."  She was SO slow, and folks, I do NOT walk quickly.  So this is where S and my association with Mayta ends, on Day 5.  We went to lunch, walked around Trastevere, and generally had a nice afternoon.  When we got back to the hotel at 5:40 or so, my dad and M weren't back.  Weird, but okay.  I was falling asleep, and S was working on photo stuff when there was a knock on the door.  It had to be around 6:30.

S answered the door.  He said my dad's sunglasses were askew on his head, and that his expression was one of utter defeat.  M and him walked into the room, and began to describe their afternoon.  Everything I am about to relate to you happened to them, and not us, and I hope I don't get any details wrong, because it was bad.  Really.  Really.  Bad.

First, Mayta (or the driver that Mayta hired) drove them all over, willy-nilly, talking about neighborhoods and prices to live there, and if it was a good neighborhood or not.  Then, for lunch, she suggested pizza, but ended up taking them to a Sicilian restaurant (that she loved) heavy on the seafood, and according to my dad and M, not good.  And at one point, Mayta went to the bathroom and came out of it with blood dribbling out of the corners of her mouth.  Ew.  It was a two-hour lunch, and during that two-hour time, the drive (and Mayta) were on the clock.  Finally, they leave lunch, and she's got them driving around.  She takes them up on a hill (the Janiculum, from what I can figure out), and points out landmarks.  Then she asks them if they want to see the Catacombs, and they say yes.  She gets them there, and tells them okay, now you've got hire a tour guide for in there, and I'll wait here.

Probably they were so defeated by this point that they just agreed, and it might have been an actual relief to get away from her.  They do the tour, come out, and she takes them back into Rome.  My dad said that at one point (because she wasn't doing much explaining of the landmarks) he was surprised that he recognized Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, where the Bocca della Verita is.  He said, "Hey look, isn't that the Bocca della Verita?" and she said, yeah yeah, and they kept driving.  Eventually, the ended up in the Colosseum, and they went in, but only on the ground level.  Because, um, yeah, Mayta couldn't walk up all those stairs.  Then, they came back to the hotel.  Within seconds of getting out of the van, my dad shot off an email on his crackberry that her services wouldn't been needed the next day, and whabbam.  Our Day 6 plans were gone.

But.  Considering that Mayta hadn't taken them in the Forum (because how could she walk around inside it), the Spanish Steps, or any other churches, and had been incredibly unsatisfactory in St. Peter's, we decided that although the Tivoli tour was cancelled, we had plenty to see.  I had told S, on our way back to the hotel after our wandering afternoon, that I was dreading the next day, because I simply couldn't imagine that Mayta could do it, take us to the two Villas and manage it.  And I was dreading being around her again.  He asked me if I thought my dad would cancel, and I said no.  I was wrong, and boy was I glad.  My dad and M, to be fair, took a big one for the team.  (Even though S and I didn't, I will point out again, duck out that day.  We were always meant to duck out.)  M said that at one point, she sent my dad a text message (crackberry to crackberry) during the tour that said something to the effect of: this is awful get me out. 

I'll give it to Mayta though.  She kept us talking about her for the remainder of the trip.  And frankly, after that, any little thing that went our way was the greatest luck in the world.  Also, no pictures of her exist, at least not from the front.  S has one of the top half of her head, but it doesn't at all capture the hideousness of it all.  My dad speculated that perhaps taking a pictures wasn't cool--that it would be like taking a picture of a car crash.  People, it was THAT horrible.

Okay, after that, I'm done.  Day 6, 7 and 8 tomorrow.  But nothing'll compare to the Mayta day, I'll tell you right now.

Comments

[M]

I have been looking for the troll drawing that we think looks like Mayta, but I haven't found it yet.

The worst part of the whole experience (worse than the cost and worse than the frustration of being with an inept and smelly tour guide) was that we totally wasted a whole day in Rome. Other than the Sistine Chapel, we had to go re-visit or visit every site we thought we were supposed to cover.

ARRRGH!
M

[Rita]

Wow. Just. Wow. I'm so sorry you guys had to go through that. You'd think she wouldn't even schedule tours that involve a lot of walking. I mean, all of Rome involves walking, but only the first floor of the Colosseum? The Forum? That's a lot of walking.

A I can't believe you were unimpressed by the Sistene Chapel. I was floored. Of course, I had also just read The Agony and the Extasy and was completely in love with Michelangelo.