Alright, I have established the validity of the cimice invasion, now I must tell you what happened after the discovery. Monday night, when the bedbugs were discovered, Jenna and I were shunned. We were told to close the door to our room and leave our possessions in the infested area. We were instructed to sleep in the living room. The living room is not a typical Americano cozy space, but consists of a chair and a sofa, a thin sheet borrowed from our C.A., and the absolute coldest temperature found in the apartment because of its many windows and the fact that in Milano our heat is shut off every night at 10pm. I believe this is also why I am frequently forced to take freezing showers. In turn, the freezing showers are probably the reason why Europeans bathe less and therefore produce terrible body odor oftentimes. I will not detail these odors at the moment a) because I'm eating and b) because there is enough revulsion in this blog already. Anyways, Jenna and I spent a sleepless night freezing and worrying about what tomorrow would bring. I lay awake on the cold chair imagining the cimice feeding on my beautiful new fur vest and cried. These were the first of many tears in the days to come.
Tuesday morning, after a sleepless night, my roommates and I headed to the IES center for our 9am classes and to speak with the housing director who was notified of the discovery the night before. I'll call our housing director, M, to protect her identity in this account and myself in case I rant in an inappropriate manner. After 2 1/2 hours of intensive Italian class, we reported to M's office for instructions. We were informed that we had 2 hours to evacuate from our apartment before the exterminators would arrive with the bug bomb. We were to leave everything in our rooms and take only a few articles of clothing in a sealed trash bag. The catch was that any article of clothing that went into this bag would need to be washed at approximately 200 degrees Farenheit aka ruined and destroyed. Obvi, I am not agreeable to the idea of ruining my clothing and hardly packed anything that could be considered junk clothes for my semester in Milan, arguably the greatest fashion capital of the world. Along with packing our trash bags, we had to strew the rest of our belongings about the apartment so they could be fully treated with the pesticide. We raced about our apartment during our time limit like some daytime grocery store game show I used to watch when I stayed home sick when I was younger where the contestants had shopping carts and various challenges to grab certain products off the shelves in a set amount of time. In the show they were gambling with money, in our apartment we were gambling with the risk of spreading cimice across the greater metropolis of Milano and beyond.
We left our newly nested abode loaded down with trash bags of t-shirts to boil in the laundry, food we didn't want to waste, and all of our infested bedding to take to the center as specimen evidence. We left our apartment in the hands of two men in ghostbuster uniforms, lugging heavy trash bags like some sort of disaspora. We snuck out the back door of the building to avoid the attention of our doorman and fellow residents. Much to our relief, Eduardo, my roommate Brooke’s TIM boyfriend was kind enough to load our bags into his car. I later learned that he insisted on hiding them in the trunk for fear that the policia would stop him to question him about harboring illegal goods or running a homeless shelter out of the trunk of his mother’s car. While Eduardo and Brooke drove to our temporary shelter at the Collegio dorms, the rest of us girls made our way on the metro to bumblefuck Milan. Who knew this region existed with highways and gas stations?! There are no gas stations in Milan, but we were clearly headed to an alternative world. In addition to the cornucopia of automobiles we discovered, we also found that this region at the far end of the green metro line was plagued by thick, heavy fog. We exited our stop and stood in what looked like the creation of a dozen fog machines at some European Halloween party (I am unsure of whether they celebrate this holiday here, but I suspect they would be quite good at it considering the amount of food with eyeballs I see in the markets). Naturally between the insufficient directions provided by M (we later find this is standard and to vastly lower our expectations of her) and the heavy cloak of fog, we are soon lost and disoriented. And guess what? No one has even heard of the Collegio di Milano! Of course not, it would be too fortunate for us to be able to find our new shelter quickly, so we wait it out in a small coffee shop in which we were instructed not to sit on the chairs for fear of spreading our cimice. Freezing, frightened, and with sore legs from standing, we waited for our trash bag caravan to arrive and direct us to the Collegio.
When at last we did find the massive establishment of dorms (obviously the Italians couldn't see them from the windows of their speeding cars--again we were in bumblefuck where people drove cars rather than using public transport like the rest of the city), we had to propagate M's concocted tale that granted us entry to the Collegio in the first place. Apparently when people heard of the bedbugs they didn't want us in their beds. So instead we had to tell everyone that our plumbing overflowed and soaked our apartment and all of our belongings. Thanks for the shot at our dignity, M. No one in the apartment was able to produce anything that could clog the toilets because of the lack of fiber and extreme amounts of carbs we were consuming anyways! Pardon my language, especially you, Cat, I know how you hate foul talk, but it is a harsh reality of traveling without your FiberOne bars. Our dignity gone, we followed the procedure of entering our new apartments, stripping down, sealing our clothes in bags, and showering. We dressed in sweats and workout tops borrowed from our wonderful bedbug-free friends and headed downstairs to start boiling our clothes.
Next issue: coin-operated laundry machines. Typically, not a big deal; however, with our continuing streak of great luck, we had only dollar bills. Does the front desk have change? No way! Do the vending machines give change? Nope, they only accept students' swipe cards. Do the students' standing by the vending machines have coins? Of course they wouldn't. Plan of attack: walk upstairs to the library where students are hard at work, still in my sweats, stomach-baring, spandex workout tank, and oh yes, no shoes (they were being soaked in bleach) to beg for coins. I knew I needed an extra boost, so I relied on the never-failing hair flip before marching into the library and disrupting the first male I spotted. Thankfully he spoke English and hair flip, so he proceeded to race to his room to look for coins. He asked his friends. And when all else failed, he left his studies to walk to the closest pizzeria to get change. TIM. Thank goodness for chivalry and the lessons I've learned from Legally Blonde or I don't know how we would have ever washed our clothes that night. About 6 hours later, after boiling and excessive heat drying, we all had a t-shirt to wear to class the next morning. A very nice accompaniment to our still soaking shoes, and you guessed it, no coats because those had to be taken to the dry cleaners the next day!
A picture's worth a thousand words, so let me show you just how we made our way to the metro the next morning in this ensemble di hobo.
Photo Credit: Jenna Michelle
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