May 19

We started the day with a walking tour through Venice, where we learned more about the city's history and how the city was built. We also learned some fun new words and how the address system in the city works. We were taken inside a church we had all passed every day but never paid any attention to. We should have, because the inside is filled with beautiful art by some guys who were pretty good with a paintbrush. Sounds like plenty of excitement for one day, right? Wrong. Some of us planned to go to Rome for the weekend. We bought our tickets earlier this week and already booked a hostel, so we just had to get on the train and go. It was going to be about a four hour ride- nothing we couldn't handle. The train departed from and arrived at each station exactly as scheduled- it was actually quite marvelous. That is, until we were almost at the stop before ours. Just 15 minutes before we were scheduled to get off the train, it stopped. A standard announcement came over the loudspeaker in Italian then in English: there was traffic on the rail, we would be slightly delayed, and not to get off the train. Sounds good to me, delays happen. There's nothing I can do about it, right? My iPod and Kindle still had plenty of battery, so I wasn't worried. Eventually the canned announcements turned into announcements from real people...who didn't repeat them in English. When they did,  the English announcement was far shorter and presumably less descriptive than the Italian one. Eventually we figured out that there had been a fire at one of the stations and that we were to be rerouted.  After many starts, stops, pauses, and half translations, we were on our way to our destination... three hours later than planned. But, we checked into the hostel with little incident, so I'd say the adventure was a success.