More of Italy - Florence and Venice

So Florence was a really neat small city. We went inside a few churches, and walked around and saw tons of great things. Our first day, we just basically explored the city. We went into a few churches, and took lots of pictures. We ate dinner at a cute Italian restaurant, we all ordered yummy pizza, and then McKay left for home Monday night. As we were walking to the train station with McKay after dinner right before he left, we ran into the missionaries!!!! We were so excited to talk with them, and it was really cool to see them! The church really is world-wide!!!
Tuesday morning, Kari, Heather, and I waited in line for about 45 minutes to get into the Uffizi Museum, one of the most famous museums in Italy. It is a pretty large museum, with paintings dating back probably almost a thousand years! We also saw a few pieces of artwork by Michelangelo and Leonardo di Vinci. It was pretty amazing!! Now, I am no artist, nor so I understand very much about paintings, but as I was walking through the museum, I was thinking about how this artwork is done. It is amazing talent! It is similar with pieces of literature, I have no idea how authors, or artists come up with what they do. I really admire anyone and every one who can gather their thoughts and put them on paper, it is definitely a wonder to me!
After we were done with the museum, we did some souvenir shopping, and then we rushed back to our hostel, picked up our suitcases and literally ran to the train station. We had about 10 minutes to catch our train to Venice.
Bad news: At the train station in Florence, there is a huge board that shows the times of when trains leave, and the times are posted usually about 10 minutes previously to departure time. Well, when we arrived at the train station, we had about 4 minutes before our train was going to leave, but we did not see our train number posted. PANIC! We guessed it was at a certain platform, but as we ran to the train and asked one of the workers if it was the right now, they said no, and of course we could not understand anymore than ‘no’. PANIC MORE! After running to another train, and asking some people who kept pointing us in no direction that was helpful, we looked at the clock and the time was past. So we had missed our train. At this moment, I didn’t panic. Instead, I thought, this happens all the time to people, it just makes the trip more exciting! And, it makes for a good story to laugh about later. As we walked back to the big board, all of sudden Venice was on the screen, it showed that it would be 10 minutes late! So we actually were not crazy, the train was just late!! For some odd reason, this was not posted until after the time the train was supposed to leave, maybe in Italy, they like to play tricks on us! Panic is supposed to be part of the adventure!
So we did in fact make it on our train, and we made it safely to Venice! Instead of having 5 hours there, we only had four, but that was still enough time to take lots of pictures, and eat some more gelato before we made it back to the train for an 11pm departure to Munich, Germany.