Chasing the Rising Sun

When in Rome… it was not my day.
The vengeful cramps of my unfertilized children felt like a battlefield was in my womb. It seems that I had adapted too well to British weather, hence I became a pathetic damp mess in the Italian sun with more liquid on my upper lip than in my whole body. I was the grumpiest tourist to trudge through Rome since the Imperial Army. I did not loot and destroy but I did the next worst thing when in Rome, I did not appreciate it.
As walking was futile, my parents debated between taking a taxi or bus while I debated the comfort between a boiling hot pavement and a stranger’s lap.
My father asked a man how much it was to the Vatican, suddenly my pain dispersed. Nothing like the prospect of being a human pancake puts cramps into perspective.
A pedicab. A semi-electric bike attached to a metal construction of questionable stability. Don’t get me wrong, I have been in worse. Tricycles in the Philippines are rusty metal constructions of obvious instability, but this green crib on wheels would be in the midst of mopeds, taxis, buses and cars in a tourist dense city.
Nevertheless, the outrageous ride began and we should have known from his smile, which lacked teeth and sanity, that he was not a normal driver. The only rational thing about this man was his long hair in a ponytail ornamented with a straw hat; if you’re going to go the wrong way up a one-way street you don’t want your sandy locks to get in your eyes! If you’re going to flirt with a lady as you pedal by, you might as well have a cap to doff when you shout, ‘We should get married!’
(Yet to a lady that he was not particularly fond of received; ‘You’re so ugly you should be a man!’)
All this while pedaling his impossibly skinny legs to carry three terrified tourists through pedestrian and motor traffic so close my mother broke a nail on an oncoming bus.
The noise of traffic and the smell of fuel is the same wherever you are in the world, but for me it is a reminder of that crazy ride.
I realized that cities are not museums, they are other people’s homes. They are not just places to see and photograph, they are to be experienced. I’m not advising you to gauge your stomach out to replicate my experience, but simply to value every moment. Without that pain, the breeze that he created as he pedaled wouldn’t have been so beautiful. The laughter in that tiny cab would not have felt earned. The man would just have been another maniac driver not Marcus the Saviour, God bless.