Here is my most important piece of Eurotrip advice: do not take overnight trains.
Kelsey and I reserved two "couchettes" for six hours of sleep, costing us more than a night in a hostel. the couchettes were two of six, in stacks of three, in a train car about the size of the bathroom at Guthrie Beach. We shared our cabin with a group of old American women who were traveling to Rome, and snored. Our beds were on the very top, about seven feet off of the ground, and the ceiling was so close to our faces that sitting up was impossible without some special maneuvering. The train was hot, and we were sweating and feeling quite claustrophobic. Perhaps this misery is the reason why our trip to Italy wasn't favorable. We got up on the wrong side of the couchette.
Our train arrived in Florence at 6 AM and we walked to our hostel. The owner told us to come back at 8:30, so we went and sat on a bench in a Piazza. Prepare to see the only trees and grass in Florence, through they are chained off from pedestrians.
When we got back to the hostel, I went to sleep immediately and in a sick-joke kind of way on the top bunk of a bunk bed--the only bed that was free. I slept until the heat was too much, woke up and took a shower. Kelsey had been walking around Florence a bit and taking a few pictures.
After my cold (deliberately so) shower Kelsey and I went and got some sandwiches and began our first day in Italy. We bought a few of the sandwiches pictured above, but when we sat to eat them, we were told we could only sit at the restaurant if we bought drinks. We were only going to drink water, and we had brought our own bottle as opposed to buying the water they had, so we decided to take our food to a park and eat it there. The owner of our hostel had shown us a few different parks on a map, so we walked to the closest one only to find it gated off. The next closest park was across the city but we decided to walk in that direction and keep our eyes peeled for some shade and grass to sit and eat our food. After forty-five minutes of walking through heaps of tourists and dodging street vendors, we had still encountered no grass or shade. We only wanted to sit, eat, and maybe take a nap. Our map told us of a huge park, but it was only accessible through a very specific and small road. We walked up the road, which was more of a mountain lined with homes and apartments. It made for some good pictures but at the end of the walk, we found the park gated, and saw that we needed to pay an admission fee of 7 euros a piece.
We sat at the gates for some time, resting our legs and feet. At that point we had decided that we did not like Florence, found an internet cafe and began figuring out how to leave the city and where to go next. Pictures from the day:
When we got back to our hostel, the owner had news for us. He had overbooked and we were to go to Hotel Veneto, a place a few blocks away. At first we were excited to be upgraded from an 8-bed dorm room to a private room, but we hadn't seen the hotel and our wishful thinking was premature. When we got to our new room, we settled in unsure of our safety and the hygiene of our set-up. Someone banged on our door and when we opened it, they had run off. I got on the internet to read about the hotel and hopefully assuage my paranoia, but instead read customer reviews about luggage being stolen and the hotel being run illegally and as a front for other things. It was already too late to leave Florence or find a new place to sleep, so we talked to our hostel owner and told him we would not be staying in Florence a second night, and got that money back. Here is a first: the toilet was in the shower.
We emailed our next hostel, the Chalet Martin in Switzerland, and asked if they had any vacancies. The room we had booked turned out to be free at the time, so we elected to go on to Switzerland three days early and take a few days' rest in the Alps.
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