Travel day. Also, apologies for the issues with these posts. The website is broken and nobody's been able to post for a few days now, so I don't know when you might be able to read this.

I got up in time to check out and take another interview from that company I interviewed with on the hostel's roof deck. After this, I left to get my bus down to Rome. Annoyingly, I had to go all the way out of the city again by tram. I wish the buses could come into town, though I suppose I understand why they don't. Still, Florence's public transit is pretty terrible and it was annoying to have to spend all that time on the tram with so much luggage. The bus ride was uneventful. I was once again amazed by how mountainous Italy is. Obviously there are the Alps up north and then isolated volcanoes, but I was surprised to see huge mountain ranges stretching down the length of the peninsula. It's really beautiful, and there's got to be some sort of AT equivalent that traverses them all.

I got into Rome in the evening and was dropped off at a different train station from the one I needed to connect down to my hostel. So I hopped on the metro for a few stops - it was pretty straightforward actually, there aren't many lines at all - and then I fought with my terrible internet in that station to try and buy my ticket. This next train is equivalent to a commuter rail, so you can't just tap your card the way you'd be able to with a standard metro. It turns out that my internet is poor enough that loading the pages takes longer than the payment service they use allows for, so the request would time out before I could actually pay. I tried to get onto the station wifi, but they needed to text me a confirmation code. These codes took forever to reach me for some reason, and they'd also expired before I could use them to get wifi access. I missed the train I'd intended to take since even though I was in the right place staring at the train, I just couldn't buy a ticket with how fussy the internet was being. I finally got a miraculously efficient load time over cell data and at last bought a ticket for a train departing just 20 minutes after the one I'd missed.

The hostel owner picked me up at the train station. I had no idea what he looked like, but I was assured that he'd recognize me despite having never seen any pictures of me aside from possibly my Whatsapp profile photo (which doesn't even show my face). Sure enough, he immediately knew who I was and we drove off to the property. The drive was only a few minutes and would be walkable, but I was glad to not be dragging my bags the whole way, in particular because there were no sidewalks for much of the distance. The hostel owners were extremely friendly and clearly love their jobs - this probably the nicest hostel I've ever stayed at. Sure, they have a sauna, pool, gym, kitchen, living rooms, and generally very comfortable accommodations, but the real kicker is that they also have a dog, 4 goats, 2 donkeys, and 16 of the most affectionate cats I've ever encountered. I really have no idea how they managed to find this many cats that are all so incredible friendly and love attention as much as this. They also had three other staff, these 3 Swedish girls who were apparently 21 but both acted and appeared much younger than that. Their responsibilities seemed pretty limited - mostly just gossiping with the female guests and then lightly flirting/looking pretty for the male guests. They were decent company, though it was hard to get a read on them since they would frequently laugh at things I said which weren't intended as jokes and I couldn't shake the suspicion that they weren't genuinely enjoying my company but just doing their jobs. They clearly were all infatuated with this other guest, a hunky English guitarist around my age. He was actually really cool and, when I found him playing chess with the Swedes, we ended up getting into a whole chess bootcamp once it became clear that I was far better than anyone else there. He learned a lot, and later admitted that his interest in improving is mostly because there's some girl he's trying to impress back home who likes chess a lot and always beats him.

Tomorrow I'm headed into Rome. There's a partial train strike, so that might be a challenge, but I'll make it work. I don't really know what to expect from the city, so I'm taking tomorrow to mostly just explore and decide what experiences might be worth spending additional money on.