A Tale of Two Bus Stops

Last night I ventured downtown to catch up with my roommate from last semester, currently traveling through Italy with a group of American students studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence. After hanging at a very fine restaurant for dinner (though I had already eaten at the villa, and filled up with the most superb tiramisu), we checked out a few bars in the Santa Croce area. The televisions at the bar, luckily, were showing luge! Having had an itch to watch any olympic sport for several days, I was pumped to watch men slide down a track of bare ice at hundreds of miles per hour. Ah, the winter olympics- a grand
celebration of going downhill fast!

Following the bar, I headed back to the train station to take the bus (l'autobus ventotto) back to the villa and be asleep by midnight. But for some reason, all of the bus stops had been switched. The 2 and the 28, or the busses that serve Sesto-Fiorentino, were nowhere to be seen. Luckily we weren't the only ones perplexed. Several Italians, who happened to be our age, were in the same situation (though I should preface this by saying they had consumed massive quantities of alcohol during the day's Carnivale festivities). Luckily for them, we found the new bus stops directly outside of McDonald's. I'm definitely proud of my Italian skills from last night. I talked to a woman who asked me what time it was in the united states, and I said seven hours behind. I was also asked by someone "Aspetta il ventotto?" And I replied, "Si." I'm getting the hang of this!

After the first hour of waiting for the bus, a guy who looked to also be my age asked me (in english) if we knew where Florence's other train station was. Apparently, he had missed his earlier train to Venice, and now needed to go to the obscurely located Rifredi Station (not even listed on a map) to catch a train at 2 am. Though I couldn't help him locate the station, he did find out that he could take the 28 bus to the neighborhood he needed to go. He was from Egypt, traveling through Italy as part of an internship with ISIC. With him was another college student, this time from Brazil. I sure hope they're in Venice by now. They were so pleasant despite being totally screwed on their travel situation. If only I could learn that skill!

For the record, last night was the first time in my life I had met three different people from three different continents at the same place, in the span of one hour.

Benvenutu al'Italia.