Flying by the seats of our pants

Woke up this morning and hopped a train to Italy. No idea where we'll sleep tonight; everything in Florence seems to be booked. Whatever.

We went through this tunnel on the train and when we came out everything looked older and more run down. Sure enough, we'd just crossed into Italy. Vodaphone keeps sending me text messages when I change countries; I can't decide how I feel about the fact that my cell phone company knows exactly where I am. Calling Italy from France on a Spanish phone can't be cheap, but at least we have the option. We'll see how it does in Croatia.

Intercountry trains are funny. Going from Barcelona to Montpellier the announcements were in Spanish, then Catalan, then French. Until we crossed into France, where they were in French then Spanish, doing away with Catalan entirely. Going from France to Italy, everything was in French while we were in France and once we crossed into Italy it switched to Italian followed by English. Even though it's all the same train.

Anyway. I miss Spain. I mean, of course I miss Spain. I can mostly communicate and basically know what I'm doing there. (Funny how you have to go away to realize that.) But I think it's more than that. I think I miss the people. I miss being able to go into any bar, anywhere, and get coffee and a ham sandwich and know it's gonna be good. I even kinda miss the mullets and piercings. Uh oh.

On the second of the three trains that it took to go from Nice to Florence (we left Nice at 10am and arrived in Florence at 6:30pm), the bathroom was a hole in the bottom of the train. There was a toilet-like seat, but it just led to a hole where everything fell out and landed on the tracks below. Yuck.

Florence is really nice, but already really touristy even in May. And it's gonna be really rushed: We're leaving tomorrow afternoon to take more trains across Italy and then take a ferry to Croatia. But Croatia is the whole point of this trip; I'll travel around Italy for real some other time. Oh, and we finally found a hotel that's actually pretty nice and fairly cheap. Sometimes you get lucky.

I keep trying to speak Spanish here, hoping that people will understand me and that I'll then understand when they speak Italian back to me. It seemed to work with this adorable old man on the train from Nice, but other than that it either fails completely or people answer me in English. Oh well. Croatian will be our fourth language in four days. It's kinda like Russian so I'll try to get by in really bad Russian, but I think we'll be in trouble unless people speak some English. My Serbian landlord says that everyone in Croatia speaks English, but I've learned that "Everyone speaks English" can mean drastically different things to different people.

We met these racist Australians on the first train today. In addition to complaining about how there are too many black people in Paris, they were saying that Australia had to send soldiers to Iraq because the US saved their asses in World War II. I know a lot of people think that way; I'm not sure I do. At some point the ass-saving WWII debts have to be forgiven, right? Anyway, I also met this Scottish girl who mistook my saying I speak English for saying I am English, and when she realized I'm American started lecturing me on how I should never tell anyone I'm English because "that's the worst." Okay. People are weird.