It's All Over-Rated Except Drugs and Alcohol - Part 7

It's the eve of New Year's Eve. The New Year is supposed to be all about awakening, resolutions and positive changes. So, I've written a story bearing that in mind. This is one about a not-so-positive change, but hey, this series hasn't been positive in the least thus far. Maybe, and just maybe, to ring in the new year, I'll post something positive to get off to a good start!

8. Viva Italia!

On a school-sanctioned trip to Italy one year, a girl got bored of following the guided tours around the historical landmarks, of little to no significance. So, naturally, she did what any other bored teenager would do - ask Siri to list the best clubs in her vicinity in Rome. Siri, obedient as always, spewed out her favorites. Now, going to a club by herself (or rather, with only Siri by her side), would be un-cool, so the girl was first going to have to befriend some locals.

She arrived at a fountain. It was one of those typically Roman ones with baby angels spitting out water through conchs. Nearby, just lazily enjoying the sun, were a few hot Italian ladies, who seemed to be about the same age as our dear protagonist. She walked up and said "Ciao!". Through Siri, she expressed the desire to get wasted at a Roman club because, well, "when in Rome". Keenly, the girls accepted the offer, and asked for the location of the girl's hotel. She gave it. They agreed on a time. The blueprint had been laid.

There was one small issue. This being a school-sanctioned trip, there was supervision. Unlike our darling alcoholic-on-vacation from story #7, this girl did have some elders to report to. Upon arrival to the hotel, the girl began drafting plans for how she would escape the hotel past curfew. She painstakingly did this, failing to realize that the supervisors here were on vacation themselves. Sure, the adults in the hotel were supposed to make sure that the students were safe and sound, but they weren't going to make their own lives more difficult by standing over each student like a hawk. They trusted that the students present on this excursion were A) Too fearful of the system to try anything. (By "fearful of the system", I mean phased by the simple notion that adults were "watching" them). and B) Old enough to safely and securely manage to survive the 10-day trip, without too much assistance. After all, why would you destroy your own vacation by making yourself a surveillance device, just to make your students lives miserable?

So, all this girl's planning was irrelevant. She walked by her supervisor's room to hear if she was asleep, and instead heard laughter and clinking glass. The teachers were having just as much fun. The girl walked down to the lobby at around 10pm and found her new friends waiting for her in skimpy clothing. She wasn't dressed like a nun herself. They headed out into the Roman night. It was beautiful. They arrived at some nearby club, where the girls knew the bouncer (lucky for the girl. How did she manage to make such suiting friends?). They went in, and it was everything our sweet girl could've hoped for. She was content. First thing was first - sex. No, no, not sex per se - sex on the beach: the cocktail. They ordered a few. Down the hatch they went. Then a few more. Then a few more. Eventually, the girl lost count.

Regardless, she kept dancing! After a night well-spent, she had to get back to the hotel. 9am was the time of the next guided tour that everybody had to be present for. By this point in the cocktail-count, the girl didn't care for going back to the lame hotel, but her adoring new friends did. They, being more stable, decided to take her back and drop her off. They lugged her through the beautiful, moonlit streets, where she broke both her heels. The entire time, she gushed over how exhilarating the night had been.

They made it to the hotel. The Roman girls brought their Asian-American friend to the reception and asked for her room number. The fine Italian gentleman at the desk looked at the situation in front of him quite normally. He asked if the girl was part of the Canadian excursion. That she was, and the Roman girls knew it, so they answered the man. The receptionist thought that his task of finding the exact room of the girl would be easy. He told the Roman girls that he would just look for a Chinese name on the list - a "Ching or a Chang or a Wang". (Living in Vancouver, I have a lot of exposure to Chinese culture, so this man sounds like an idiot to me, but perhaps Rome is lacking in Oriental flavors.) The task was much more difficult than he had imagined since everybody on the list had a Chinese last name. The school that had arrived on the trip was from my city of Vancouver. It was from my school. At my school, the population is predominantly Asian. He asked if the part-conscious girl had a first name. They weren't sure, but they tried to recall what she had said. After a few failed guesses, one Roman bambina, remembered that, on one of the texts she had received, the girl had written her name. She scrambled through her phone and found it. They now had the name, and resultantly, the room number.

The receptionist, highly understanding, handed one of the girls a set of keys to the room and requested she return them later. They got in the elevator, dropped the girl on her bed, and left after scribbling a quick little note to her about what happened.They gave the key back to the receptionist and left.

In the morning, the girl was awoken by a banging on her door. Another classmate had been sent by the teacher to awake her. She got up, scrubbed her face with a wet towel, threw up once, slipped on some less-tattered clothes and exited. No one noticed anything. One teacher called her "sleepyhead" and blamed the inability to wake up on jetlag. And it was just that easy.

With this night, our dear protagonist discovered that, as she would later confide in me, she was a "heavyweight". She explained how grateful she was to the Roman ladies for helping her and being so caring and attentive, and how grateful she was to the fine, Italian gentleman-receptionist for not saying a peep to a teacher.

She referred to that night as her "alcoholic-awakening". (Get it? There is a "sexual-awakening", but this is with alcohol. Ha-ha!)