Once in a blue moon, I’ll become a planner. Without notice, my attention to prepatory detail will skyrocket. I’ll memorize dates, addresses, routes of travel, alternate routes of travel, weather plans—you name it. I glide through my planned journeys with a Gabby Douglas-like deftness. That said, the moon is rarely blue and it’s even rarer still that I actually slip into planer-mode. More often than naught, I tend to just…go with the flow.

“Buy your plane ticket a few months in advance!” My study abroad advisor warned. I put it off until about a month before I was to show up in Florence.  “Be sure to learn a few key Italian phrases before you go!” My friends suggested. I snapped a few photos from my traveller’s companion as I disembarked from my plane in Rome. “Have a plan!” My mentor urged me. I didn’t. Not really.

You see I tend to err on the side of “pfft, it’ll be fine!” because generally speaking, it’s always fine. Trekking through New York to Jersey to get to Newark International was a joy. I met/fell in love with/considered proposing to a gorgeous customs officer during breezed through my layover in Montreal. Sure, I’d bought my tickets and glanced at them in passing a few weeks before I set out to travel. But I definitely hadn’t poured over and memorized them the way a true planner would have. “This,” I thought. “Is going to be a piece of cake.” And it was.

Until I got to Rome.

All of the preparation in the world doesn’t really prepare you to be dropped off in a country you’ve never been to where the only language spoken is one you’re woefully unfamiliar with. Whereas Montreal’s French was exciting and familiar, the Italian plastered throughout Aeroporto di Fiumicino was downright intimidating.

To get to my ultimate destination in Florence, I needed to catch  a bus from the airport to the main train station. “Shouldn’t be too difficult,” I thought. “Everyone speaks English here.”

They tell you that people speak English in Italy. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. People in the larger more tourist-y cities who have tourist-service oriented jobs have a passing familiarity with the language inasmuch as it relates to their particular service. “Oh, vuoi andare a Firenze? The train leaves here. 4:30.”  Says the woman who sells train tickets. But which train? Where do I pay? Where do I get off. She responds in pleasant, but clearly annoyed Italian. I sheepishly nod and say my thanks, backing away confused, agitated, and left with a distinct feeling of…woe.

The Termini Roma is gargantuan.

It’s buzzes with a cacophonous hum from machines of all sorts—trains, refrigerators, the click-clacking of so many high-heeled shoes. Oh, the shoes. And the people wearing the shoes. I’d worked up this idea in my mind of the metropolitan Italian. Someone painfully yet effortlessly fashionable who would stride through any setting with poise and a vague sense of…”eh”, that air of being bored with/better than/mildly amused by one’s surroundings. Wandering around the Termini, I kept my lookout for my fantasy Italian Posh Spice & Becks.

What I found instead was quite different.

I’d imagined myself the sole tourist drifting aimlessly through the station’s many overpriced café shops. Surely everyone else around me, be they Italian or not, knew what they were doing. I was the only asshole who hadn’t bothered to plan out his admittedly complex voyage through multiple countries and was going to pay the price and be stuck in Rome for the night.

As I calmed down and began to think my way through my situation other sounds in the station began to stand out from the cacophonous “click-clack” though. Confused voices in particular. Voices in Japanese and German and English. Lost voices expressing much of what I was feeling. “Where the hell am I? Why is there no wi-fi? I think we missed our train!” I felt brighter hearing these voices, even if I couldn’t understand what exactly they were saying. The exasperated inflections were enough. I wasn’t alone.

Schadenfreude traditionally refers to a feeling of joy at the misfortune of others. I felt something akin to it that day in the train station trudging along with my beleaguered international brethren. In place of joy though, I felt something closer to kinship. A sense of having shared destiny of being lost, in transit, and looking for a place to rest our heads.