Chapter 21: You Are Now Free to Move About Europe

Part 2

This is from my forthcoming book, American Expat: Moving Abroad Solo After 60. Find it on Kickstarter.

Florence

Our next city was Florence and we packed our belongings up. My backpack was heavier than when I started because Mary Anne and Angie had brought me pounds(!) of Peets’s coffee. I was definitely NOT going to complain about the extra weight.

We walked up to the train station, navigating with Google maps and going, as we do, in the general direction. The train station was huge and confusing. Angie and I were pretty useless at figuring out how to get tickets and where to find the trains. We walked up to one of the information counters. The woman there was very eager to help us out, so much so that we were afraid that we were going to miss our train. She chattered on, telling us all about everything: what we should do in Rome (even though we were leaving), where we should go in Florence. Other places we should visit.

Did you ever just stand there and watch words continuously fall out of someone’s mouth? That was the three of us, trying very politely to explain that we just needed to be directed to where we could buy tickets. Mary Anne quietly disappeared, asked someone else, and led us to the ticketing machines. We took a bit of time figuring out the machine, feeding in our money, and eventually, we all had tickets. We made our way to the platform and settled into our seats on the train, laughing about the chattiness of the information lady. She was definitely the right person for the job.

High speed trains get the job done. We went through rolling hills and in just a couple of hours, we were pulling into Florence, another madhouse of a train station. I was in dire need of coffee and even though there were several cafés in the station, they were crowded and we decided to get to our lodgings first.

I was pretty sure that our taxi driver had brought us to the wrong place when we pulled up outside our next Airbnb. A plaque on the building said “Embassy of Bangladesh” and I was very sure we didn’t have diplomatic credentials. At least I didn’t. We were in the right place but it was no longer an embassy. Or maybe just the bottom floor was the embassy? We loaded up our luggage with one person into the cubicle of a lift and two of us took the stairs. We were a bit early for check-in (the cleaners were still there) but able to drop off luggage, which freed up our hands to eat lunch.