Arriving in Rome--the hard stuff

OK, Gary here. I finally figured out how to add my own contributions to the blog. I have to confess that when we first arrived I started to wonder what we had got ourselves into. I started to get a sense that things would be harder than expected when I got a couple of calls from Richard Holzapfel, my colleague from Religious Ed at BYU, who had come over several days earlier to set up. We didn't realize that BYU Study Abroad hadn't paid the full amounts on the apartments--just the deposits. It was too late to do electronic transfers, so we had to bring cash. Richard, his wife, and his grown daughter divided $30,000 among the three of them. I had to bring $15,000. This presented a few problems. First, it's hard to find a bank in Provo that will give you that much cash with a day or two notice. Second, it's hard to find a bank here in Rome that will exchange that much cash. I did find a currency exchange down by the Vatican that didn't even blink when I asked if I could exchange that much money. And they actually had a pretty good rate. Apparently, the American Express bank by the Spanish Steps is another place. Let's just say that we were happy to finally get all the cash into the hands of the apartment owners (and not be carrying it around Rome).

But this itself wasn't as easy as it would seem. Richard had to meet each of them personally. And like the cable guy, the owners wanted a narrow window for you and a broad window for them. They wanted to show up some time, say, between 2 pm and 8 pm, but they wanted you to commit to a specific time. But when you did, they often showed up 30-60 minutes late. Just more of the local culture. And the apartments are further apart than they seem on the map. In some cases they are separated by hills, motorways, and railways. When the students arrived, they came at various times during the day. We had them meet intially at the Holzapfel's apartment, and then poor Richard had to walk them to their apartments. Sometimes he walked to the same apartment several times during the same day.

Fortunately, for me, Richard did most of this in advance, but we were pretty cash poor for the first few days. You can only withdraw $500 a day from the ATM, and we were caught off guard by how many things were cash only that we expected to pay by credit card. Even major museums here don't take credit cards. Only a few restaurants do. It seems like all we did the first few days was visit sites with students, try to get money, resolve problems with apartments, and sleep. Fortunately, the grocery stores take credit cards. And even though we had called all the credit card companies before we left, we still had problems with the fraud alert people. I'm actually glad that AnneMarie and Maren arrived after all this had settled down.

Here's what we learned. We should have paid for everything we could in advance--and checked more carefully to ensure that the Study Abroad office actually did this. We should have checked everyone into a hotel the first night and then moved them all to their apartments the next day. We should have ordered some euros several weeks before leaving so that we didn't have to deal with the problem of currency exchange and ATM restrictions during our first few days.