A Florence Disater!

Wednesday night my roommate asked me what I was doing on Friday and whether or not I wanted to go to Florence or not. So of course I said yes because what else would I do on a Friday. So we looked up train prices and times and it looked like we could catch a train at 10:30 am and get into Florence by 12:00. An hour and 1/2 to get to Florence what could possibly go wrong...

Friday morning two of my roommates and I arrive at the train station and buy our tickets, excited for our adventure. The man who sold us our ticket told us that it was at platform 9. So the three of us venture over to platform 9 and the first thing we notice is that the sign says the train is headed to Milan. Maybe we should have taken that as bas sign but no... We proceed onto the train. As we head to our compartment, we notice that there is not another soul on this train... I don't even think there was a conductor on this train. It was so eerie and it definitely didn't feel right. At 10:30, there is still no one on this train and we start getting a little worried. Then the train started to move and we had to make a decision...stay on the empty train headed who knows where or get off quick. We decided to jump off.

Getting on the wrong train should have been a warning but we decided not to heed it. We went back to the ticket booth and told them we missed our train and they said it was no problem there was another one leaving at 11:15. So we headed over to the next gate and things seemed to be going well for us. One, there were people on this train, and Two the sign said it was going to Florence. So the three of us got into the train and ended up in a compartment with these three really nice women from the Midwest. Our trip to Florence seemed like it was finally going to go well. We even got let off the hook for not verifying our train ticket by the very cute ticket checker. But after the 2nd hour on the train we start thinking wow, this is taking a lot longer than we thought. 4 hours after leaving Rome, we arrive in Florence.

It is now 3:30 and the three of us were aggravated that our 2-hour train ride lasted 4 hours. Apparently, the second train was a local train and so it took twice as long. It would have been nice to know but whatever we were now in Florence and we were going to make the most of it. After about 15 minutes, we still hadn't found any of the things we wanted to see in Florence and we're getting irritated because our map said everything was close to the train station (reason why I hate maps). So we decide to buy a new map and we eventually find everything. It turns out we went the wrong way out of the train station and went an hour out of our way. By the time we get to the center of Florence is getting dark, and a lot of the museums and churches were closed. We didn't get to see David, we didn't get to go inside the Duomo and my camera takes bad pictures at night so I wasn't even able to take good pictures. The only good thing about the trip is that I bought a cute purse from a street vendor and haggled for my first time. She only dropped the price 5 euros but I think for my first time I did pretty well.

If you thought our mishaps ended here, you would be wrong, because the three of us still had to make it back to Rome. So we got our tickets, we verified our tickets, and we got on the right train. Things were looking up. However, it was dark, and the train doesn't announce the name of the train station and so when we saw a station that said Roma, we panicked and got off. Apparently, we got off a stop too soon, and we had to take the metro. This metro train was intense. The doors opened before it even stopped and you literally had 10 seconds to jump on or off the tram because it was not going to wait for you. We saw quite a few people get stuck either on or off it.We eventually made it back to our apartment that night and though the trip didn't go the way we wanted and though we had a lot of travel mistakes, we had a good time. By the end of the night, we could not stop laughing and I definitely think it will be a trip that I will never forget. The day I went to Florence will live on to possibly be my craziest adventure!Hopefully I'll make it back there this semester so that I can do Florence right.
Ciao
Amanda