All men in Italy look like Rocky

Fine, not all of them, but definitely more than I was expecting. Luckily not too too many talked like him (if you've ever seen Rocky, it's a good movie, but he sounds like an idiot) (yeah, yeah, I know Sylvester Stallone talks like that because of a birth defect, but still!).

I realized that I wrote about the bare-bones of my trip (maybe a liiiittle bit more than that) but a lot of other crazy stuff happened too, so I'm trying to remember some of my good stories. Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. The very first day that I was actually going into Rome to do stuff, on my very first Metro ride (this makes me sound like I've never been on a Metro before, but I just mean in Rome), this crazy lady on the train stands up and starts singing opera. Everyone in the car gets really quiet and tries to pretend like they don't notice her...really effective, since obviously they'd all stopped talking. That went on for a little while, and then she walked around trying to collect money from people then moved on to the next car (aside: crazy people doing stuff like this on trains did not turn out to be an unusual occurrence, although even for the crazies she was quite odd). The craziest thing? I saw her two days later, on Christmas, just walking around the streets like a normal person! I mean, she looked a little nutty, but I probably wouldn't have noticed her if she hadn't been the opera-singing lady. In Naples a similar thing happened. On the train back to my hostel, some guy started playing--and singing--both "Happy birthday" and the Macarena on the saxophone.

2. In the hostel I stayed in in Florence, there were 4-bed rooms but for most of the time it was just me and 2 other girls. The second night we were there, this Italian lady comes in, who actually was really nice, and she was there for the night. From what we could discern from her limited English and our limited Italian, she had just had surgery on her back and had gotten out of the hospital that day...why she was staying in a hostel, who knows? I'm also not sure she really understood English that well, because at some point someone asked her where she was from and she said Romania, but she didn't look Romanian, didn't have a Romanian accent, didn't have a Romanian name, and didn't seem to speak Romanian. But she was clearly in a lot of pain, though, and the bed sucked (I had passed it over myself). She kept making these weird sounds of pain that were kind of half-groan, half-sigh. I went to take a shower, and after I got out of the shower I brushed my teeth/went to the bathroom, and I heard these really loud moans of pleasure that sounded like someone was having sex. I was like, dang, guys, keep it down! But when I got back to the room, I realized it had just been her, making her pain sounds...

3. On Christmas Day in Rome, all the metros stopped running at 1 PM, even though there were no signs informing anyone of this and no one really seemed to know that it would be happening (except, I would assume, the Metro employees). It took me forever to figure out how to get back to my hostel because none of the tourist information offices were open (OF COURSE) and none of the bus-ticket-sellers at any of the tabacco stands was willing or able to help me. I wound up having to call my hostel from my German cell phone, which I'm sure cost about 2 euros a minute, but eventually I found out what bus to take so that I could meet up with the second bus I'd have to take. Well, after this long adventure, I was relieved to be on the second bus, the one that would take me to the stop by the hostel. My relief was short-lived. Somehow, even though I'd never seen another accident (I'm not sure how--people are INSANE drivers in Italy) the bus got in an accident. It was a hit-and-run--the car merged into the bus and then took off (I have a feeling that car was pretty messed up after that). Luckily we were only stopped for about 15 minutes, but it was quite a frustrating end to Christmas. That isn't even the end of the story. I must attract accidents, because on the last day that I was in Italy, I woke up early to take the bus so I could get to the airport. I get to the bus stop, and what do I see? Another bus that had been involved in an accident. To the bus drivers' credit, it was neither of their fault either time. Moral of the story: never rent a car in Italy.