The first time I ever went abroad
I was the worst. Classic Ugly American.
This is the first installment of a mini-memoir from my
first backpacking trip to Europe in 2010. Sorry in advance!
“I’m gonna see how long I can make it without smoking weed!” I boldly told Sammy Calvin — or, Cal, my childhood best friend — as we drunkenly rode the train from Pontassieve to downtown Florence.
We first met the summer after kindergarten, when Cal was just a sandy-haired kid on the swim team and I was a dark-skinned sack of bones running around. We grew up together, and now here we were, half the world away, as I soaked in my first backpacking experience abroad.
After we spent a few days at the winery where he worked for room & board – enjoying free wine, the postcard perfect rolling hills, delicious homecooked meals from the host family — Cal messaged some girls that he had met while waiting for me at the airport. We geared up for a big night out.
Once we made it to Florence, we stopped to get beers at a market or a restaurant, and Cal went to the bathroom. As I stood out on the street, I started chopping it up with this super-friendly French-Canadian guy who was probably our age.
“Dude, do you know where I can get any weed?” I asked him.
“I don’t have weed but I can get you hash,” he said. “You can put it in your cigarettes.”
“Fuck yeah! Thanks!”
As the guy went into the corner store next door that he ran with his pops, Cal came back out to the street.
“I’m ‘bout to buy some hash from this guy!” I told him.
“Dude, didn’t you just tell me you were gonna see how long you could go without smoking weed?”
“Yeah, but I’m drunk in Italy! Who cares!”
The dude came back with some hash in foil and we all started shooting the shit a bit more over street beers. It was one of those alleys where there were no cars, just people buzzing by, stores on the first floor and classic apartments overhead. Cal told us about his recent travels — he had been around places like Germany, Amsterdam, Prague and Budapest — the circuit that I’d be hitting up shortly.
I thanked the guy for the dank and he told us, “Find me on Facebook, man! Alex Montana! I’m the only one!”
Cal rolled me up a hashy-doobie and I smoked it, not as discreetly as I should have, but fuck it, I felt invincible at that point.
The rest of the night blurred but I remember housing some McDonald’s, before we ended up at this busy bar full of American exchange students called Club 21. We met the girls, classic white-girl Americans studying abroad, and none of them seemed too interested in me.
‘Am I too boring? Too brown?’ I thought.
I felt socially awkward and started beating myself up that, here I was, in the opportunity of a lifetime, and I couldn’t talk to a girl to save my life. The social pressure I heaped on myself kept building. I kept drinking. It was non buono.
At that point in our drinking careers, Cal drank like a fish and was an absolute tank. He had the ability to strike up conversations with people (whether they wanted to talk or not) wherever he went, especially in a party atmosphere like that.
I lost track of Cal and got tired of all the American English banter surrounding me, tired of all the Top 40 American music playing. For all I knew, I was in a bar on Mill Avenue in Tempe during my studies at Arizona State. Worldly, 23-year-old me wanted an authentic Italian experience, damnit!
So I bolted the bar and figured I’d meet up with Cal sometime, somehow, somewhere, even though cell phone calls and texts were hella expensive abroad. I wandered the winding, historic streets looking for a hostel and thought it’d be easy to find one in the city center, but no dice. I felt like I was stumbling through a maze as I officially approached POM (Pass Out Mode), where I would become capable of falling asleep on virtually any horizontal surface.
I didn’t wanna do that in Florence, though.
Eventually, I started to give up and the streets were deathly quiet, so I went into an old hotel. I drunkenly demanded a room (in English, no less) from the lone receptionist, who could not be flustered.
“I know you have a room in here. I’m not leaving ‘til you give me a room.”
I was the worst. Classic Ugly American.
The concierge’s unnerved disposition was pretty hilarious. Bruh did not give a SHIT about me at all. He didn’t smile or laugh, just stood there silently and stared at me with those big brown pupils, the whites of his eyes hanging below. Completely unmoved.
After a couple minutes of being a jackass, I hit the streets again and called up Cal from my flip phone, international prices be damned.
“Where did you go?” he asked me.
“I dunno man! I started looking for a hostel now I have no idea where I am!”
Then I took my phone off my ear and started yelling, “CALVIN!!! CAN YOU HEAR MEEEEE?????”
I was the only one on the street at this point and all the nearby neighbors probably HATED me as my drunken yells bounced off their windows. I was an American Abomination.
“Wanna just meet me at the Duomo?!!”
After a few more minutes of drunkenly dawdling the streets, I found the Duomo sitting in silence, the plaza completely devoid of the daytime tourists. I sat on a bench for a bit, admiring the huge dome — cuz I had nothing else to do — before Cal came stumbling through.
“Dude, what happened?” he asked. “Why did you leave?”
“I dunno, man. I had to get out of there. I tried to find a place to POM, then I got pwned by this dominator at the hotel desk.”
At this point, maybe 2 in the morning, the last train back to Pontassieve had long gone. To make things worse, Cal lost his wallet and I already had lost my hash. We faced the brutal reality that we probably had to sleep outside until the morning to ride back to Pontassieve.
At least he had his passport … and a pocket Italian-English dictionary for some reason.
In a fit of rage, I took the pocket dictionary from him and threw it as far as I could into the dark, empty plaza. The dictionary couldn’t have gone far, but neither of us made an effort to retrieve it. We had given up. Pure despair in Firenze.
Just as we started to lay down on some hard, stone benches in the plaza, a couple of drunk, bubbly American girls — one blonde and one brunette — rolled through.
“Hey! Do you guys need a place to stay?!”
“Oh my God! Yes, thank you so much!”
We followed them to an apartment nearby and walked up some stairs to the place where the blonde girl was staying. The two girls giggled and laughed once we got into the apartment, and we thanked them a few more times before they went to her room.
“Sorry, I don’t have any blankets or pillows for you guys!” she said.
“No, it's fine! We’re drunk enough! You’re a lifesaver! Thank you!”
Either she didn’t have a living room or we were just idiots, because we slept on the kitchen floor. By the time we woke up the next morning, the girls were gone and the apartment was silent.
“Helloooo?” We asked, looking around like hungover gargoyles. “Is anyone here?”
But nothing. We never saw those angels ever again.