America 1 + America 2 take a trip: Day 23-Day 25: We don't do this thing called "vacation" well.

We're combining these three days because...well, because not much noteworthy happened. After our gelato crawl day, we had decided that our final day—which had been left open in our itinerary—would be a beach day trip. However, our fruitless search for the laundromat the night before scrapped that idea, seeing as clean clothes was becoming a necessity (to keep you from thinking we have embraced this as a 100% natural experience, let it be noted that laundry was done in Kalamata). So we did laundry, worked on some revision, and went out to dinner for our last night at the same restaurant where we ate the first night. We had our same waiter boy-man, though we sat inside this time. Immediately following our staking out of a table, a man—who was clearly friends with the staff, we found out later he was an employee—leaned over the two-person table next to ours and pretended to fight our server for the right to take our order. It was very entertaining, in a joking manner, and not particularly creepy.
Long—and entertaining—story short, he proceeded to abandon our order to our server (his friend) and sat down at the table next to us and order his own dish while chatting the whole time. We pretty much laughed through dinner at his stories and antics and I attempted at the end to get him to pay for our dinners (it didn't work). We then proceeded to our gelato place where the very entertaining server had been from the day before and Sami (the man) tagged along, as he lived near the Pantheon (how many people in the world can say, “oh, yeah, I live near the Pantheon”??). He was entertained by our lack of obeying crosswalks and streetlights, and my unconscious gestures to slow moving people blocking sidewalks in front of us. We parted after we all got gelato and we made our way back up to the B&B without incident.

The next day was travel day, and after a slight panic about changed train docking areas, we managed to get on the right one and sit in a compartment with four other Italians, us in the middle. Though we were left alone (to do more revision) for part of it, we were eventually dragged into the conversation (blanco piel? Must be English. I was very sad when the lady said that, because I was under the impression that we looked tan). Our Spanish worked enough so that we could definitely understand most of what they were saying, and we could communicate to the one guy who knew Spanish and a bit of English. It was very interesting, and a great exercise in keeping up with Italian and seeing the differences from Spanish.

The ride itself was uneventful; the countryside is pretty and very, very green. Getting off in Firenze, we caught another train to get to the right station we wanted and then walked the nearly 1K to the hostel, Plus Florence. When I booked it, I knew that it was catered towards the youth set, but being here has just been...meh. It's been weeks since I heard this much English spoken, and months since I have heard this many American accents. It's like having all of the (pretentious) people who are pretending to be independent and go off on their own and be in a foreign country, yet come to a city that is even more catered to tourists than Rome was. We're bored here, in case you haven't guessed: unless you like high fashion shopping, there is little to do here. We also didn't have a map at first, so that was also disappointing. But to be honest, there's just not much here. So what do we do when bored? Finish our walk-about of the impressive cathedrals (all 3 of them) and return to sunbathe on the roof. Don't judge, there REALLY ISN'T ANYTHING TO DO HERE. We don't shop at Gucci, or Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, etc. so a bit out of our depth. But, also in our true fashion, we began to plot how to get out of the town and do things that sounded fun: like bike riding, part two! We liked it so much in Ireland that we had been talking about it ever since, and here was our chance. So, we've planned out how to get bikes tomorrow and go up the road to find some ruins and get some sort of exercise in. We managed to not find the restaurant we wanted for dinner tonight and ended up walking about 5k around the opposite (not tourist-y) side of Florence, which was interesting, except the part where we didn't get to eat until half 8 at night. So some exercise done, but biking and getting away from obnoxious tourists who clearly have a “search for the opposite gender” agenda is definitely needed.