Our first train ride experience! Traveling from Zagreb to Florence was Erin and my first trip on a train, aside from the little tourist rides in Northern New Mexico and the Grand Canyon Area. Our trip had three different trains (basically we had to change trains twice) and was an overnight trip. Now let me tell you, train travel is very different than plane travel. At the airport you are security checked and checked again and your boarding pass and passport have to be pretty much glued to your hand. There are gate numbers and seat numbers on your ticket,
and there's boarding, and waiting. At the train station (especially when you can't exactly read the signs) it's a little different. No security checks, you just walk right through and even right on to the train without so much as a "bok" from someone working on the train. Luckily Tomy helped us find the platform we needed (as it was not clearly marked on the tickets... apparently you need to check the arrival board for that kind of stuff) and when our train arrived we were well... fairly certain it was the right one, so we got on, found what we assumed would be an acceptable compartment for us to be in (again we are still kind of boggled by the lack of seat numbers issue) and our train adventure began.
We passed the time by playing some cards, and I had a completely awesome gin streak and basically dominated go fish. BAM.
Now let me go back and say that when we bought our tickets to Florence we bought them at the train station, choosing one of the two options the "information" lady gave us, who didn't speak a lot of English. Now we knew the time we had to leave and the time and place we would arrive, but the in between was a little unclear. There were city names of the places we had to change, the second of which was Venice, and the first of which was Villach West. Now when we were on the train the border control came through and stamped passports and from that we could tell we had gone into Slovenia, so we figured Villach must be in Slovenia! But somehow when we got off the train for our first change all the signs were in 
German (or at least something that looked like German). We were a little confused. We got even more confused when we realized that we were the only ones who got off the train and that the station was empty. Literally. We were the only two people in sight. Not even a person working there. And did I mention it was about 2 am? It felt like the twilight zone. So we made our way to the "waiting room" aka the only room that was unlocked and had a light on. Now with almost 3 hours to kill we decided to play some Texas holdem with I may say some very outrageous bets considering we had nothing to bet with and just made up whatever we wanted (I'm pretty sure we owe each other quite a lot of money and extravagant items) and laugh at our weird situation of being in a practically abandoned train station at 3am in... well we didn't even know what country we were in.
Here's a video of our confusion.
Eventually our train did come (after some time spent in a little glass room outside on the platform spent playing 20 questions, of which Erin kept picking "meatball sub" as we had recently watched the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episode where Joey and Phoebe play). When we got on we were yet again boggled by the seating situation, as we had actual seat numbers this time, but our seats where taken by two people completely passed out across them. Finally, Erin found some room in a compartment with just one sleeping person (a very nice guy, with an awesome accent, who I learned was from London when he woke up for 30 seconds as we shuffled our stuff around) and tried not to be too creepy as we came in and got our bags settled and tried to get a little bit of sleep. When we looked it up later we found out that we had been in Austria, which means that we got to go through some pretty amazing mountains on the way from there to Venice. Luckily, the mountains came at just about the same time as the sunrise and were an absolutely breathtaking sight to see. Unluckily I was seeing them in a half asleep travel fatigue state and failed to find the camera and take a picture to put up here. So you'll just have to trust me.
Our train change in Venice was much more normal, and pretty soon we were on our final train ride and arriving in Florence. Once there we made our way to our apartment (which btw has awesome seahorse handles on the door and is about a 2.5 minute walk from Pitti Palace and Ponte Vecchio) and stated our Florentine adventure!
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