It was Kamilla’s idea to get on the bus. We couldn’t read Italian; there was no schedule. “We’ll just see where it goes,” she said. “We don’t even have to buy a ticket. We’ll sit in the back and if they start checking we’ll be like, ‘oh, in Italy you have to buy a ticket for the bus?’”
We were working as au pairs in Italy for the summer. I had responded to an unsolicited e-mail in my junk box from an Italian woman looking for help with her four-year-old twins. She assured me that she would only need our help for a few hours a day. We would have plenty of free time to hang out on the beach and take Italian classes. It would be just like the Georgetown program at the Villa, I reasoned, except we would be getting paid.
Swallowing my suspicion that this woman might sell us into prostitution in Bulgaria, I uncorked a bottle of wine and asked my friend Kamilla to join me. She agreed, and soon we were fantasizing about kissing boys on Vespas and eating gelato a la the Olsen twins in When In Rome.
We arrived in Numana, a tiny sea-side town with one supermarket, three pizzerias and approximately 45 gelaterias. Unfortunately, no one came to meet us, and we were forced to spend most of the night waiting for our new boss in the train station.
We should have been thankful for that first night. It was much more comfortable than the beds at our host’s house, which weren’t actually beds at all, but pull-out chairs—in the kitchen, which also served as our bedroom, the playroom and the living room.
As if the living conditions weren’t bad enough, there were also the children. The boys, whom we referred to as “Thing One” and “Thing Two,” refused to eat any food that didn’t contain a toy in the box, which in Italy means candy and ice cream. Thus their diet kept them in a state of near-hyperglycemic shock pretty much every waking moment. What’s more, the boys were deliberately nap-deprived. After nine hours on the beach playing “throw rocks at the au pair,” the boys were exhausted. However, their mother had forbidden the boys to nap during the day in order to ensure that they fell asleep the exact moment she became responsible for them again. Thus it fell to us, the au pairs, to force them to stay awake, alternating between holding their eyes open and bribing them with toys.
Which brings me back to the bus stop. By some stroke of luck we had miraculously managed to get a two hour break, and we wanted to get as far away possible.
We began to worry after about an hour and a half of sitting on the bus. We had passed ten billion sunflower fields and the occasional gelateria, but there was no sign of civilization.
Even if we got off the bus I knew we wouldn’t make it back to the house in time.
I made an executive decision. “Push the fermata button,” I told Kamilla.
“I think that’s just for an emergency,” she said.
“This is an emergency. Push the button.”
The bus let us off on a deserted stretch of highway. I began composing my obituary in my head. Luckily, Kamilla’s Soviet childhood had instilled in her a sense of ingenuity much greater than mine. She walked calmly to the side of the road and stuck out her arm.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.
“Hitchhiking,” she replied patiently.
“What?” I cried.
“Oh come on,” she said. “I do it all the time in Moscow. It’s just like taking a taxi, except it doesn’t cost any money.”
As I stood there on the side of the highway, alternatively hoping someone would stop and praying that they wouldn’t, Kamilla turned to me.
”You know, it could be worse,” she said with a smile. “At least we didn’t buy a ticket for that bus.”
Finally a young guy picked us up and, realizing we had no idea how to get back to where we lived, drove us from village to village, asking, “does this look familiar?” In return, I promised to take his entire extended family to Disney World if they ever visited Florida.
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly the kind of cultural exchange you would get at the Villa, but it was exactly $5,876 cheaper.
