Close Calls

Great victory! Near defeat! It's been an exciting 24 hours to be sure. After my Italian class yesterday I walked over to the Teatro Comunale to see if I could get tickets to the opera that was performing last night: Salome, by Richard Strauss. My housemate Christina and I put our names down as #40 and #42 on the list posted on the wall outside the opera house even though they said they only take the first 35 people. While we were waiting for them to call names, we made friends with a Japanese man named Kenji who is from Tokyo and studying music in Bologna. He's an opera singer, a bass, and likes Verdi and Puccini. He may also be the missing link between Italy and Japan that I've been searching for. Stay tuned.

Fortunately, there were enough no-shows that we got into the opera! Yay! It was 1 hr 45 mins with no intermission, and we had to lean like 3 feet over the balcony to even see the stage, since our seats were way up in the nose-bleed section, practically on the roof. Pictures below!

Gorgeous opera house.

Huge bad-ass axe thing.

Overlapping with this joyous occasion was a personal crisis. I had put my opera ticket in my wallet while standing outside the theater, and then walked the mile back to my apartment with Christina. A couple blocks before we reached the apartment, I reached into my coat pocket to pull out my wallet and look at my ticket. No wallet. I checked my backpack and all my pockets and couldn't find it. Given my usual tendency to move erratically, I figured it was probable that it had slipped out of my pocket somewhere along the way, so I retraced my steps all the way back to the theater, running the whole way. No wallet.

My friends Caroline, Wendy, and Samira were outside the theater because they had also tried to get opera tickets, but without avail, and they were nice enough to buy me gelato, beer, and espresso--or, the trifecta, as Dave Jenkins put it. The lady in the box office at the theater recognized me from earlier and so gave me a pass for the opera in the same seat I had reserved. I also called Christina and had her email my mom telling her to freeze my credit and debit cards. So we saw the show at 8:30 PM, went out afterwards with Christina's language partner Luca and his friend Giuseppe, and then I went back home intending to go the police station the next day to report the missing wallet.

While I was at the Brown office the next day, waiting to walk to the police station with Anna Maria, the coordinator for the Brown in Bologna program, I received a phone call on my cell. I'm not very good at conducting phone conversations in Italian yet, so it went something like this:

Me: "Pronto" (Hello)

Man: "Pronto"

(long pause)

Man: "Pronto?"

Me: "Si! Ciao! Hi!"

And then he said he was calling from the carabinieri, Italy's military police, who were in possession of my wallet. Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!!! So I got the address, got on the city bus, got off at the wrong stop, walked the wrong way from the wrong stop, and eventually I found the police station and identified myself and got my wallet with EVERYTHING in it! I am still not sure if the carabinieri found the wallet themselves or if some good Samaritan picked it up and turned it in. I didn't want to ask any more questions since I was already not understanding some of the things the officer was telling me. We had an interesting exchange in which he told me he liked the picture of the eagle on my passport, I told him that I was studying with Brown in Bologna, I explained what and where Rhode Island was, and he told me to put a contact information card in my wallet for the future. The police were only able to contact me because I had left the plastic card that I got with my new SIM card in my wallet, which had my Italian cell phone number on it. I went back to the Brown office, arranged for my credit and debit cards to be reissued, and then went home and ate pasta. All is right with the world.

The law is the true embodiment of everything that's excellent.