Italy, part one

We took the 15h11 train from Montpellier to Nice, from whence we were supposed to take the night train, which left at 21h07, to Florence. About 45 minutes after we left Montpellier, our train broke down in this little middle-of-nowhere train station in Arles. For two hours. We took turns leaving someone with our stuff and taking walks outside, all the while trying to think where we were going to sleep that night since we were going to miss the train to Florence. Once the train finally got going again around 18h10, the conductor came over the loudspeaker and said the night trains to Rome and Venice were going to wait for us. That was fantastic for us, since we were going to Florence, but we were confused since according to the train schedule there was no train to Rome. We wallowed in our confusion for the remaining hours of the train ride, got to Nice around 22h00, and lo and behold, there was the train to Rome and Venice, but alas no train to Florence. We started dejectedly wandering off, now trying to think of where we were going to sleep and how we were going to get to Florence the next day. As one last resort we checked our train number and realized that, though it didn't say Florence anywhere in the terminal or on the train, the train to Rome and Venice was indeed the our train. By this time the conductor was blowing his whistle to signal the departure of the train; everyone had already boarded. We frantically ran up to him, blabbering in French about how this was our train and we needed to get on it. We ran to the nearest door (which was fortunately the car next to ours) and jumped on board as the train started pulling away. Some nice man who was laready on held the door (which was trying to close) open for us so we could climb on as fast as possible. I wsa pretty sure at least one of us was going to get left behind. We made it to our room. At this point it's like 22h30, none of us have eaten since lunch, and there's no food car on the train, so we split a bottle of wine for dinner, then went to bed.

But we made it to Florence! Florence is gorgeous and I could have spent our entire week there. We saw some amazing churches and cathedrals, including the one that had the preserved body of one of the archbishops of Florence from the 1400s on display. The priest in there was the cutest little old man ever and spoke to us for a few minutes in simple Italian (most of which we were able to get the gist of from French) and some broken English. If I lived in Florence, that's the church I would attend: I loved it.

While we were there we also saw Michelangelo's David, which was magnificent, and the graves of Michelangelo, Galileo, machiavelli, and Danti, who are all inhumed in the same churched. We walked around Florence a lot and just marveled at how gorgeous it is. We alos found a Mexican restaurant! We were nearly beside ourselves with excitement. France doesn't have any Mexican, and we all sorely missed it. So probably the most exciting thing in Florence was eating Mexican. Go figure.

Updates coming soon on Rome and Venice!