More from Italy! We go to Flourence! Hijinx ensue!!

We got up early to leave Venice and promptly realized that although our spacious camping bungalow had two showers, neither of them worked particularly well. Took the bus from the campground to the city center and took our time strolling to the train station, where we sat on the sunny steps and ate breakfast purchased from the train station cafeteria. I ended up with yogurt and a very sugary donut that I wanted to wish away almost immediately after eating it.
As we waited for the train to come, I snuck glances at the American newspapers some fellow travelers were reading, looking for news of the election. It took me a few slightly conspicuous passes to get the gist of the main headline: trouble in Iraq is bad news of Bush reelection campaign. I was hoping for something a little juicer, but with Internet access costing close to seven euros an hour in Italy, I would take my homefront news any way I could get it.
We got relatively comfy seats on the train, heading to Florence, and pressed our noses to the windows as we crossed Italy, green and sun-spotted in mid-morning.
Once we arrived in the Renaissance capital we had a bit of business to take care of: we needed to call the hostel we had booked for that night in Cinque Terre and find out how late we would be able, and then based off of that figure, we had to buy train tickets, hopefully late enough in the day that we would have time to enjoy Florence. This seemed simple enough, until I was found that the number I had for the hostel was . . . well, something was very wrong with it. I could dial it well enough. That was no problem. But after I dialed the number I only got a dial tone. I tried adding the Italian country code prefix. I tried subtracting it. I let others try as well. But we could get no human being on the other end of the phone line. Heck, we couldn’t even get a robot! And if we could have, it probably would have been an Italian robot, and that wouldn’t have done any good either.
So we’re stuck in the train station in Venice. I wait in line at the Custom Service station for a good twenty minutes as family with crying kids try and negotiate their tickets, then finally get to talk to an agent whose English is about as good as my Spanish. Of course feel very stupid asking her if she can just tell me how to make a call from a payphone. But she can’t get our number to work, either.
It is at this point that I came to face the painfully obvious truth: there was no technical difficulty, no language problem, no question of the right amount of change in the pay phone. Only that I had forgotten to write down the last digit in the phone number.
We had been in Florence for over an hour by the time we finally left the train station – in search of an Internet portal. Forking over a euro for ten minutes of time in a crowded cubbyhole crammed full of websurfers, I was able to access my e-mail and get the full number -- turns out I had only left off the zero at the end. And when my friends asked to see the number as I had correctly written it on my hand in purple pen, I sheepishly realized I forgotten the zero a second time.
Back at the train station I was finally able to talk with someone at the hostel. After I stammered, “uh, hello. Do you speak English?” the man explained that we had to be there by eight o’clock. Which gave us about three more hours in Florence before we had to catch a train. By the time we got something to eat at the train station’s beyond-awful food court (where they sold the greasiest, blandest pizza I have ever put in my mouth, and featured a McDonalds offering some sort of Japanese promotion that included “Samurai Shakes” and “Zen Nuggets”), it was clear we were not going to have time to see The David. Or much else for that matter.
But we were bound to see everything we could.
NEXT TIME: all we could see were a few paintings, a cathedral and a morgue.