The morning before we left, I'd discovered free Kindle books and had a downloading frenzy, so I was ready for the long journey. I decided to read my the one I paid for, though, which was Stephen King's Under the Dome, for which I'd seen posters in Paris. I couldn't stop. I read that 1000-page novel in about 5 days, which is impressive considering that I was also traveling Europe at the time. It was amazing. I recommend it. We drove through Slovenia, which was absolutely beautiful. If I had the time, I'd go there just to spend a day or two in one of the small towns nestled in the mountains.We arrived in Maestre at 2 AM and immediately collapsed into our beds. The hotel rooms were really nice, but the hotel layout was really confusing, and different elevators/stairwells took you different places. but it was nice nonetheless. The breakfast was good, too, and I had the most delicious lemon tea.
We left for Venice by public bus, which was about a 20 minute ride, if I remember correctly, which I probably don't. We crossed a really long bridge to get there, and the lagoon it spanned was absolutely beautiful. I've never seen water that color in real life before, even when I lived in Hawaii. We arrived at the bus station that was located at one of Venice's larger bridges. Only 3 or 4 bridges actually cross the Grand Canal, we learned. This one we called the "slippery bridge," because that was how our art professor guide described it to us in a warning of how it could get when it rained. The first part of the trip was a journey across the city to San Marco, which would be our meeting spot for later in the day.
Dani, Laura, Julie, and I went off with Gus, Kasey, Matt, Z, and Casey to go get lunch. I was so excited for real Italian food, but the places we were passing were expensive. Venice is one of the most expensive cities in Europe, but we are college students, so we finally stopped somewhere that looked like a cheap American Chinese restaurant but with Italian food. The photos on the menu were like that of turn of the century digital cameras, with distorted colors and grainy quality, but hey, it was affordable. I rather enjoyed my margherita pizza, but Julie wasn't so lucky with her Spaghetti aglio olio e peperocino. The peppers were so hot that Casey teared up when he ate more than three slices of pepper at once. We spent our free time just exploring without any real agenda, stopping for gelato when the mood struck, because there were gelato stands everywhere!!! We got kind of lost and reached some outer edge of Venice just as Julie's gelato started melting all over her, and in her frenzied hopping around to get it off, I feared she'd fall in the water, which luckily, she did not. She did wash her feet in it, though, which was hilarious and led to a brief photo shoot session.
We met up with everyone back at San Marco in order to walk over to a gorgeous church, after which everyone who was interested went questing for a gondola ride. I was so excited, because I've always wanted to ride a gondola. We finally found a place and divided into three groups. I was afraid it wouldn't happen because it cost 80 euro per gondola, but since up to 6 people could fit into one gondola, it became more affordable once we split the cost. Our gondolier gave us a bit of a tour while on the ride, and we learned a lot about Venice that we otherwise wouldn't have, so it was nice. Afterwards, we took a vaporetto (water bus) to a more central/familiar location so we could find a place to eat dinner, and that was nice. We ate outside, and the waitress kind of hit on Nick, but we were not sure. After the lovely Italian food, we kind of explored for a while at night, which was a lot of fun until we lost Kasey and had to go find him. The group split up around that point, because people were getting tired. We waited for a while at a vaporetto stop before we found that night vaporettos didn't service that one, so we walked down to a different one and eventually made our way back the the hotel.
The next day, our first destination was the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which was really interesting, but also weird, because it was modern art. A lot of the stuff looked like a whole lot of nothing to me, but then I'd read the description and it would say stuff like, The three floating bells are a representation of lost childhood... I don't even know. There was a nice garden, though, and it has a wish tree established by Yoko Ono on which one person had asked for a French sugar daddy, which made me think of Rhaelynn and her Parisians. After this, we were free again, but Laura, Julie, Dani, and I got hopelessly lost and it was Palm Sunday so we kept running into parades of people with palm fronds, and I felt guilty that our touristy-ness was kind of interrupting that. Anyways, we ended up taking a vaporetto COMPLETELY around Venice to get somewhere familiar, when we later found out that we could have walked about 10 minutes and done the same thing. Maps are so much harder to read when you're lost. Anyways, we made it to our meeting point on time, and from there, went to a palace that was rather awesome, even though we weren't allowed to take photos. It had a lot of really creepy religious art, though.
In our final span of free time, I ventured alone into a Da Vinci exhibit because the others weren't so interested, but they should have gone with me because it was so cool! I got to play with replications of his inventions. Totally worth it. We also ate our last gelato and last Italian pizza. Our last moments in Venice was spent under the slippery bridge, waiting for everyone to show up so we could go back to the hotel and get on the bus. I'm really glad I got to go to Venice, especially as part of a group trip because I would've been so lost otherwise.
Next stop, Vienna!
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