Teresa S. : Night out in Florence - without a way home?

After three weeks of living here in Florence, I quickly realised one thing: buses here suck! Besides the city being the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to and the people being super friendly and open, nothing ever went as planned, mostly due to delayed public transport… But let’s get to that part later.

My living situation is the following: Elisa and I live together with four Spanish girls from Valencia. Sounds great (which it is most of the time), but there were some issues that needed to be sorted out. The first and biggest one is that none of them, except one, speaks a word of English or Italian, which means we can only communicate with them through Google Translate. The other problem was them being four people and us being only two. Getting hold of the kitchen or bathroom is kind of hard (also making them clean up their stuff), which we finally seem to have sorted out now, two weeks later—one day before they are leaving.

During the week, Elisa and I did some sightseeing and shopping. On Friday night, our roommates introduced me to their ten other classmates who were also here for Erasmus+ (who sadly also couldn’t speak English or Italian). Since then, they have kind of taken me with them everywhere, even though I was the only one who didn’t understand a single word they said. After all, they really tried their best to make me feel welcome, and I had a great time with them (at least on Friday).

However, on Saturday night, we all decided to go out again because one of my roommates met a boy who wanted us to come to a club a little bit outside of Florence to meet him and his friends. Since we wouldn’t let her go alone, we joined her, which sounded fine at first. When we finally got there a little after midnight, we had a great time, and a few hours later, when we wanted to get back home, we went to the nearby bus stop and waited. Guess what happened… Right! No bus (what a surprise). We even called multiple taxis and Ubers, but no one came to pick us up. So the only way to get home was walking.

Long story short: one hour and twenty minutes later, we were finally back home, and three hours after that, I was already sitting on the train on my way to the beach, completely exhausted. Even after all of that, it was still a lot of fun!!