Lost in translation...literally.

This past weekend Sarah and I decided to avoid the circus that is Carnival in Venice and visit Verona, the home of Romeo and Juliet. We took a taxi for nine people at eight Saturday morning, but only five of us showed up the other girls were still sleeping, this should have been the first clue to our traveling woes. Undeterred we hopped a train from Bassano to Padova. In Padova we had to switch trains. Ours was headed to Milan and Verona was a stop along the way. We had about twenty minutes between the two and were famished. We got the best pastry of my life. It was a square croissant that was half filled with custard and half with chocolate then drizzled with chocolate sauce on top and dusted with powdered sugar. Little did we realize what a great decision this snack would be. Filled with excitement and a sense of accomplishment for boarding the right train, we were off. Now, for those of you who don't know every ticket has an arrival time and Italian trains are prompt, and exact. Our eta was 11:00 am. Well, 11:00 came and went. We didn't think much of it because we didn't see any signs for Verona. Then the conductor said something along the lines of, "Verona...cinque." Our survival Italian kicked in and we pieced together that “cinque” is five. At the following stop we saw no signs for Verona again. We stayed on our train. At 11:45 panic hit us. We knew something was wrong. We asked the ticket lady if we had passed Verona and her face dropped. That said it all, we knew we were screwed. She informed us that the last stop was Milan and we could purchase a ticket to Verona there. The hysterics set in and a range of emotions came over us: stress, laughter, Sarah cried, shock, awe, and of course more laughter. We missed our stop! Here we were all proud, thinking we were conquering the travel faux-pa but no way Jose we were living up to them. With no other choice we dejectedly got off in Milan and got a one way ticket to Verona. Our train didn't leave for an hour so we decided to check out Milan. We arrived in Verona at 3:30.