It all started with our first ever ICE train ride to Mannheim, which only took a few hours compared to about 6 hours to Mannheim on our way to Heidelberg.  Ah, those were the days.  We waited in Mannheim for about half an hour since our train to Milano was delayed, passing the time by eating my Brödchips (this incident was responsible for converting Kitty and The Boys into Brödchip-lovers for the rest of the summer), trying to ignore this scary, drunk mumbling guy who was sitting on the bench behind us and trying to interrupt our conversations, and watching two stoned guys mutilate a vending machine and scare everybody on an almost-empty train on the next platform.  Our train finally came and it was really full.  Guys were sitting in the aisle, trying to be friendly (but instead ending up sort of creepy) by grinning at us as we passed and trying to greet us in several languages.  We all found our compartments and Kitty and I were sharing a full compartment with two African women, a German woman and an Italian man.  I knew it was going to be bad because the lady beside me was already encroaching on my space and had her feet up on my seat.  Plus the compartment was really stuffy.  It was really uncomfortable, and even if I kept shoving the woman gently out of my space, a few minutes later she was back.  I just took up as much space as I could, wrapped myself around my bag, and tried to sleep.  In the middle of the night, the passport police came through and checked people's papers, and I guess something was wrong with the African women's papers because they were asked a lot of questions on what they were doing in Germany, where they were from, and where the rest of their luggage was.  They didn't really answer the questions, so the passport police removed them and all their bags at Basel.  Welcome to Switzerland. 

It was a high-drama incident and most people missed it because they were asleep.  Later, Derek came to our compartment since there was a contentious situation in his compartment with an arrogant American guy, and with the permission of the two remaining compartment-mates, he was allowed to stay.  Before I knew it, it was morning and we were in northern Italy.  There were lots of houses with shutters on the windows, lots of mountains and lakes.  A lot more people boarded the train and by the time we reached Milan it was absolutely packed and we had just missed our connecting train to Rome.  We inquired at the information counter and found out that (1) we didn't need to have reservations if we weren't catching a high-speed train to Rome, and (2) one was leaving in 40 minutes.  We caught that train, snagged an unreserved compartment and in 6 hours we were in Rome, Eternal City.