Venetian adventures

So. Arrival in Venice. We walked off the train and it hit me as soon as I saw the boat taxies and bridges. This was it! The city itself! Unbelievable!
The bridges are great for sightseeing but not always the best for 32 students hauling luggage around. We clattered our way to the hotel. A few days before there had been a lot of flooding in Venice (nothing new there) that had flooded several of the rooms in our hotel. As such, one of them was unlivable and some of the students were going to need to be housed in different hotel. Well, seeing as there are only 4 guys in our group as opposed to 28 girls, it was decided that the guys would be expelled from the fun and sent to the other hotel. We grabbed our luggage and headed out into the dark with a map with random instructions to a place we’d never heard of. We arrived at the new hotel well enough and introduced ourselves to a guy that barely spoke English. The hotel was beautiful; a small, quaint place with lovely tea sets and upholstered chairs. The guy at the desk told us to wait for a few moments, no doubt to wait for out room to be ready. Eventually another younger guy walked into the hotel and made motions for us to follow him.

Wait…

Where are we going?

What about the lovely little hotel? The upholstery! The tea sets! The quaintness! All of it faded away, abandoning us to the dark, rainy streets of Venice. The trudge continued. Two canals, three bridges and countless cobblestones later our guide turned into a darkened alley. “This is it” I thought, “we’re going to take part in our very own dramatic mafia-movie mugging!” Ok, so nothing happened. We were fine. We did, however, end up going into a small door that led to several rooms and a coffee machine. This was our hotel! No sign, no lobby, no host. Just a couple rooms and that sad li’l coffee machine. We were supposed to meet people from our group at about this time so we hurried up and dropped our stuff, grabbed our three different keys to get out (yeah, to get out) of our hotel and took off. The rain had started at this point and, of course, I was both to forgetful and too lazy to have my umbrella handy. So I got wet. At least I wasn’t sick or anything, right? Hahahahaha…

I went back to the hotel where our director was staying to let him know where we eventually ended up (Didn’t do a lot of good. He asked where our hotel was…no idea. He asked what it was called…no name. Tough conversation). I met up with a few of the girls and we went back into the deluge, still umbrella-less, looking for something to eat. Venice is a pricey town. Even the Italians think so! We found lots of restaurants that we could’ve mortgaged our organs to eat at and passed right by. We eventually found a great little cafeteria that served pasta. I had forgotten that pasta in Italy, even at the cheapest cafeteria, is going to be AWESOME. And it was. Amazing stuff, really. I went back, met the guys and we went back to our “hotel”.

The next morning I met up with Allyson and her termporary roommate, Ellen and we went out into the city. None of us had any particular agenda to the day, we just wanted to love our time in Venice. All three of us were in various stages of being sick, which led to a slower pace but we managed. I will tell you this right now. Vienna is EASILY the single most confusing city on the face of the planet. Loads of tiny roads, canals cutting everything up. Road signs and addresses don’t match, there aren’t any maps that contain more than 30% of the roads anyway. The roads wind, the disappear suddenly only to reappear 50 meters away on a perpendicular. I’ve never actually been lost in a city when I have a map but in Venice I was. Hopelessly lost. Finally! It was GREAT! It was a smidge on the rainy side, which dampened things a bit but actually worked well for taking pictures.

We stopped for breakfast at a little bakery and had a few pastries. Not bad at all. After this the morning was taken up in being lost. We saw churches, parks, monuments, beautiful buildings, mask shops, glass makers and everything in between. Where are they, one might ask? I haven’t the foggiest. Somewhere in Venice. Go get lost and I promise you’ll find them eventually.

Eventually our stomachs caught up to us and we really started to get hungry. I pulled out my trusty “Cheap Eats in Italy” book that had led us to many a fine restaurant on the trip and picked a few. Never found the first. Or the second. Or the third. I swear it was like the roads they were on never existed or if they did they were shifting in and out of reality, never staying in one place or going any particular direction. Finally after the third failure we gave up completely, meandered off into the city, resigned to our starvation and walked into the first restaurant we found. I looked at the menu and it said “Leon Bianco”. I’ll be durned. That was the third restaurant! We found it as soon as we stopped looking! We decided that Venice was teaching us a thing or two about navigating it’s streets. You’ll only find what you seek when you stop seeking it and let the city treat you to whatever it sees fit.

Best experience in Venice was St. Mark’s square. Big famous square with churches, flooding and pigeons. Hundreds and thousands of pigeons. So cool! We bought some of the birth-control laden bird food (supplied by the city government) and immediately were completely buried in birds. They come from EVERYWHERE! These birds are ravenous! It was hilarious! I had birds on my head, birds on my arms, birds on my shoulders, birds birds birds! Allyson had a friend that nested in her purse. I also had a dogpile at my feet with several layers of battling pigeons fighting it out for the precious seed. So funny!

Later in the afternoon we were on the boardwalk along the southern coast of the islands of Venice. It was beautiful. The ocean, the trees, the view. All of it was great. The weather had gotten sunny by this point and was ideal. We found a gelato shop and got their specialty, which was a slice of hazelnut-chocolate gelato in a cup with cream. So good! (BTW, for any smart-alecks out there making cracks about my pastry and gelato eating habits, I’ll have everyone know that I’ve dropped two belt holes since I’ve been in Europe. TWO. Take that.)

At this point Ellen was feeling a bit under the weather so we returned her to the hotel. Allyson and I grabbed some drawing materials, found a sweet little dock area with some boats and sketched for a while. The night was nice and the lighting perfect so it was nice to try some drawing. I’m not exactly Picasso. Basically I can’t really draw. But hey, I’ll keep trying! Allyson gave me some pointers and I ended up with some passable sketches. We were hungry so we searched the cheap eats book for a proper restaurant for our last night in Venice, decided on a place that was supposed to have good fish. They say that fish is the thing to eat in Venice. We grabbed our table along the canal and ate grilled salmon while freezing our noog’ms off. It was quite good! That was about it for the evening…

Saturday: last day in Italy. How sad! We did some more wandering saw some more stuff, ate large amounts of gelato and generally had a heck of a day. Last meal was tasty sandwiches.

We picked up a few souvenirs, dropped by a great Post Office and met back up with the group. The train back through the Italian alps was properly beautiful. At one point our director, his wife and my roommate David got off the train during a 30-minute stop to eat. The 30-minute stop immediately ended and the train left. Hahahahaha…they got left in some tiny town in Italy. We were a bit worried but I thought it was more funny than anything. Later they held the train and all of the people they had left behind were shuttled up to return to the train. Alls well that ends well, I suppose. We all made it back in one piece, utterly exhausted and ready for a little R&R.

I LOVED Italy. So great! If you’ve been there, you understand. If you haven’t, you’d better get going! We never rode a Gondola, which I slightly regret, but I suppose that gives me an excuse to go back someday. Someday soon.