Europe Trip: Day 20, June 9th

Even though Marco had gotten home, he let me still use his bed and he just slept on the couch, which was really nice of him. That had the effect of me being lazy yet again. It is funny how with CouchSurfing you have to change your sleeping schedule depending on your hosts. So early in my trip I was at places where they got up early, and that combined with the jetlag had me up at anywhere between 6am and 8:30am.

As the trip has gone on I've been with people who go out late, and sleep in late. So once again I found myself waking up after noon. I checked my e-mail and saw that I had zero luck in finding a host in Naples, but one of the responses had said I could try this hostel if no one else could host me. When I looked into it a bit more, the hostel was rated quite high and had been given tons of awards. So I thought, why not? I booked all 3 nights (June 18th, 19th, and 20th).

Then I got ready and packed all of my stuff up, leaving at around 3:30pm. Finding the entrance to the train station from the bus stop was harder than I had been led to believe, but eventually I found it. I bought my ticket, and ate some crappy pizza and fruit at a 'restaurant' in the train station.

When there was only 15 minutes left until my train was supposed to leave I went to check the screen, only to find out that it was broken or something and showing trains from an hour or more previous. Looking around I couldn't see anyone who looked official that might work there, so I started to worry a bit. I looked at the daily schedule on a paper and it said that my train was supposed to arrive at #12, but the sign said it was going somewhere else. When a train arrived, I asked the guy who came out and he pointed to the train on the next track (#13) and said it was heading to Roma, which is the direction I was heading.

I got on and it was quite full, all the seats were taken. I walked through a half dozen compartments and couldn't find a single seat, so I had to stand. After the first stop about 20 minutes later someone got up and I was able to sit down. My stop was at Castiglion Fiorentino.

My host, Gabriele, picked me up at the train station and I dropped my stuff off at his place. When I told him I was hungry he said we could head to the center of the town and get a sandwich. Then he drove around a bit and I got to see some of the town and a good view since the town is on top of a hill.

Unfortunately he got a letter from his ex-girlfriend saying that they were completely done. We met a couple of his friends at a restaurant, and he left without saying much. Over an hour passed and we were like...where is Gabriele? Eventually he came back, and said he had gone to talk face to face with his ex since he wanted to hear it from her, not just in a letter. Luckily one of his friends, Anna, spoke quite good English and she was very nice. The other two were also nice, but not so good at English.

When Gabriele got back everything was fine. We headed back to his place around midnight, and Anna also stayed at his place. She said we could drive in to Arezzo, a city about the size of Boise, in the morning.