It's raining. I'm going to Spain!

I was ready to leave Venice when my 5 hours were up. Shortly thereafter, I got on a train to Florence. I got to Florence in the evening, and still didn't know where I would sleep. I meandered my way to an internet cafe, got on Hostelworld.com and found a pretty reasonably priced place that ended up being totally great. It's this semi-chain, the main one was the Emerald Palace and I made my way there first. They had this awesome elevator, one of the really old kind with a metal grill you open yourself. The kind in old movies. Nice. But I wasn't destined to stay there, they sent me back to one of the other locales. Still really cool, with lots of fun Aussies and Americans and other people and computers with free internet access. The staff was really good too. I ended up staying there a second night last minute, because I thought I would take an overnight train to Barcelona, but then they wanted me to pay 57 Euro for the tickets even though I have a Eurail pass, so I ditched that plan.

Because I decided last minute to stay an extra night in Florence, they almost gave me a private double room! They were worried they wouldn't have enough dorm beds, but they were going to give it to me for 20 Euro, instead of the 13 it would cost for a regular bed or the 35 it would usually cost for the room. In the end though some of the other people who came later agreed to take the double, and I got my public bed and lower price. I thought it was cool how flexible and accomodating the staff of the hostel was though.


I explored Florence a bit the one full day I had there. I went to a few of the big old churches. One of the less famous ones was shockingly beautiful on the inside. The really famous one was kind of boring on the inside and there were MILLIONS of tourists, but there was this really cool crazy painted dome you could climb up to if you paid, which I didn't. I felt about Florence kind of the way I did about Venice. It was pretty, it was obviously very old, there were definitely a lot of great pieces of art hanging around, but it didn't really feel like a place I needed to spend much time especially with a non-existant budget. Maybe I'll go back some time and see the David and some Leonardo's and all that, but not this go round.

I left Florence early Thursday morning. I spent a good chunk of that day riding trains toward Nice. The route was pretty much right along the Mediterranean, and the views were beautiful and awesome, except that we went through a shit-ton of tunnels, so they were intermittant. In the early afternoon, the train stopped in Genova, Italy and I finally got to experience a bit of the country free of rain. I went down to the waterfront, where there was this huge kind of Disney looking pirate ship. I'm not sure what it was there for, but it made me smile. There was also a big statue of Christopher Columbus, which I thought was a little random.


I made it to Nice around 4 or 5 pm and I booked a night train to Barcelona that would be leaving around 10. I decided it wasn't worth it to check my backpack at the station, since the luggage area closed at 7 anyway, so I wandered around for most of the evening with it on my back. I walked to the water and dipped my feet in the sea, but instead of sand the beach was made of little pebbles and it wasn't that nice. I saw the sun set, but after that I was wandering around in the dark. I had a truly delightful and delicious dinner of my sweet chocolatey crepe, but after that I started descending into a completely irrational frame of mind.

There have been a few times during this trip when I have become vaguely obsessive about not spending money. It's been pretty muted when I have been staying with people, or rather it's been less of an issue. When I don't need to pay for lodging and mostly don't need to pay for food, and I need to pay much less for transportation because I'm staying in one place, it's pretty easy to stick to a travel budget of 100 dollars per week. Once I got cut loose and needed to pay for hefty train reservation fees, lodging, food, internet and phone use and any kind of entertainment, that budget quickly became unreasonable. But I sort of kept trying to stick to it anyway, which meant that every time I paid for food I got stressed out, and I felt too guilty to do anything like go into museums.


I realized later that this was pretty silly. I came to Europe to see and do things and have experiences, and as long as I have more than 50 dollars in my bank account, I really shouldn't be starving myself, literally or experientially. So what if I come back poor? I can always make more money, right? But anyway, the amount of travel, moving around, making decisions about which city, country and bed to sleep in in that intense pocket of days added up to make me go a little crazy while I was wandering around Nice. I also didn't have a map and got worried I wouldn't find my way back to the train station. But eventually I did, I got on my night train, and I tried to relax.

The night train could have been better. I was in a pretty uncomfortable reclining seat, directly behind me there was this guy who was talking on a cell phone for HOURS, and I think there was a crying baby too, though that may have been one of the other trains. I managed to scrape a little sleep anyway. I had to transfer trains in Toulouse early in the morning, but I also got to eat a croissant or two and brush my teeth, and my mood improved. Then, at last, Friday morning I was on a train to Spain.