Venice-Italy part 1

School has finally ended and my month and a half of adventure has finally begun. First trip, Italy. My friend Kristy and I set off for a ten day tour of Italy. We had been talking about wanting to take a trip after exams and I'd begun to plan a trip with Kathleen that did not involve Italy. I absolutely refused to leave Europe without going to Italy so the decision was made. We sat down about a week and a half before the departure date and bought our tickets, ahh the convenience of living in France.  We chose to start in Venice and from there Florence, Cinque Terre, and Rome. In order to keep myself sane I'm going to do a post for each city and this one is dedicated to Venice!

Sunday-
We got packed in the morning and were out of the house by 12:30 to get the train to Lyon for our 4:30 plane.  Once we landed we were faced with, in my opinion, the most stressful and exciting part of a trip finding how to get to the city from the airport and from there your accommodation. If you've ever been to Venice, you know that the city is a maze so we were faced with more of a challenge than we realized. The bus from the airport plopped us out in the most overcrowded, unmarked part of Venice so we both walked in circles for a while until we asked for help and were told that we could walk to our hostel. We had to ask for more directions along the way but eventually we made it.  We lucked out with finding a hostel on the island and we found out that the building used to be a palace.  The entrance floor was marble and the stairway had busts, or as Margaret might say "head statues".  We were staying in an 8 bed female dorm and made quick friends with one of the girls who was traveling by herself. We left that night to find a little dinner, for we hadn't eaten since we left St. Etienne. Unfortunately the food we found was less than amazing, but it did the trick. A calzone and slice of pizza later we were in much better moods and spent the evening sitting on the side of the canal.

This is one of many pictures of me shoving food in my mouth, its a pretty often occurrence. 

The pizza that finally managed to satisfy us, much better than our previous calzone.

Monday-

We woke up early to do our first Rick Steve's podcast tour. We hopped on the waterbus that goes slowly through the grand canal and listened to Rick tell bad jokes and give us great information about what we were surrounded by.  Did you know that people are moving out of Venice at a rate of 1,000 per year? Rick says that in the next 100 years Venice will become a cultural Disney land.  It's too hard for people to live there with the historical regulations and it also floods around 100 times per year, the water just comes up through the stones. They have a siren, similar to the ones we have for tornadoes, and when it goes off the people run home to roll up the carpets. I'd move out too!

At the end of the tour we were dropped off at St. Marks square home of St. Marks Basilica, the campanile and the doges palace.  We stood in awe of the basilica, Kristy deemed it her favorite building she's seen in Europe.  It's wonderful with architectural influences from east and west. With lines wrapping around the building we chose not to go in and instead took Rick's advice and wandered until we were lost.  On our way to getting lost we found some lunch sat on the canal and watched the gondoliers give rides to tourists. From there we walked to the Accademia bridge, which was built in the 30's as a temporary addition, but the venetians liked it so it stayed.  We got some gelato sat in a square and played with some pigeons.  We went back to the hostel and tried to figure out how to get to the bus station in order to get to Florence the next day. We walked to the bus depot to find that the eurolines office had moved about 30 minutes away and that we'd need to find a new way to get to Florence on Tuesday, oh the joys of traveling without a solid plan.

RIP camera, I had to "borrow" this picture from google images of St, Marks Basilica. 

Somewhere between all of our travels we stopped to take a picture of the two of us on a small bridge. I put one leg up on the bridge to sit and take the picture I scooched over to get a better angle and I heard a "plop" We both looked at one another and said "What was that??" I immediately started scrambling through my purse and saying over and over again "It was my camera, it was my camera, it was my camera." In fact, it was. Wonderful! The good news is that I had already put all of my pictures from before on my computer and it was only our first day so I had only taken a few.  Thankfully Kristy brings two cameras with her on trips because she has a really good camera for great pictures and a small silver one for quick shots or days where she wants to travel light.  She kindly let me use her little silver one for the remainder of the trip and this afternoon I'm going to load the pictures from her good camera onto my computer. *This is why the Venice post is lacking in pictures.*

Kristy and our new friend listening to the dueling orchestras

We made plans to meet our hostel friend for dinner by St. Marks so we raced to go meet her. Making it there fashionably late we meandered off to where the prices would be less and got a great little meal sitting on one of Venices little streets.  This is where I found my new favorite thing to order in Italy, Gnocchi with Gorgonzola! MMmmmmmmm! After dinner we got the best gelato of the trip and went back to St. Marks where the three cafes have "dueling" orchestras that play in succession to one another. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip. It was one of those times when you have a moment of realized happiness that have been coming more and more frequently for me over the past few months. As we were standing there listening to the orchestras discussing the architecture of the basilica we were approached by a fellow english speaker whose girlfriend was sick in the hotel so we talked to one another for a bit, and went off together to find Harry's bar where Hemingway (among others) went when he was in Venice and apparently the birthplace of the bellini? I'm not entirely sure about the source of that one, but it's a cool fact! Unfortunately, Harry's was closed so we said our goodbye's to our new American friend and the three of us somehow managed to make it back through the maze to our hostel.

Tuesday-

This is Kristy Tuesday morning on the balcony of our hostel, what a view!

The alarm went off too early at 6:30 we quickly got our things together and went back to the bus station to catch a bus back to the mainland to get our train to Florence. Again, we had to ask for a lot of help our first bus driver walked us to our second stop and an Italian girl walked us to the train station, what nice people!

Venice was a beautiful city, we decided early on not to spend too much money and time to get into the attractions the city itself was all that we needed to see.