Freakishly Happy

The next day was Sunday, typically a bad day to see anything as most of Europe seems to shut down on Sunday. This being true, it makes it an ideal travel day.  Being a little tired of Rome, we decided to hop a train north to Venice.  

We took a fast train and arrived in about 5 hours.  We walked out of the station to find an amazing sunset over the city. Almost immediately we bought a gelato, me a double chocolate and John and bananna-strawberry mix.
 Italy is on a different power system as the rest of Europe, so we set out to find a power converter.  We found a friendly English-speaking street vendor who gave us directions to a electronic store.  Navigating in Venice is not easy.  We had to guess a lot, and ask for directions a lot before we finally found the shop. It was of course closed for Sunday, so we bought another gelato.  

We did not go back the same way that we came, and quickly found ourselves lost.  If you are ever lost with me, never trust my sense of direction or memory, because both are terrible. I kept saying," Oh! we just need to go over that bridge!" or "Oh! I've seen that before" both of which led us farther from where we needed to be.  We finally found a boat-bus stop that would lead us to our hotel.  We got on and had a beautiful but freezing boat ride to the island where our hotel was located.  

We dropped our stuff off at the hotel, and went to a pizza shop down the stree that we'd seen as we came in.  A strange thing about Italy that we didn't realize, was that they charge a sitting fee of 1-3€ per person.  Another strange thing is that most people choose to eat an entire pizza by themselves. This is quite amazing, as the Italians are fairly thin people, and the pizzas are fairly large.  After the 2 gelatos we'd had earlier we decided to split one.  Thank goodness too!

We arrived back at the hotel, and tried to figure out plans for the next day.  We talked for a couple of hours before heading off to bed.  Just before we went to sleep we both started feeling terrible.  I'm not sure if the bottled water was bad or if it was the two gelatos, but it was entirely unpleasant for most of the evening.  

The next day, I still felt wretched, while John felt a bit better.  We took a boat to the trainstation to drop off our bags for the day, then took another boat back towards the hotel to San Marco (just a stop along the way.)  We found a beautiful old church, and went to the top of a Campinile and looked over the whole city.  There were thousands of pigeons in the square and you could buy bags of feed and feed them.  There was no way that I was about to do this, but it was amusing watching other people who dared to try.  It was really quite nasty, as the whole square smelled like pigeon, and they would swarm almost like rats (shudder).

After that we walked around a bit more.  John had seen an advertisement for a crepe stand on the the boat, so we decided to find it.  It took a while, as the address was really vague, and as I said before, Venice is not easy to navigate.  We finally found it after much searching and askind directions from several people.  The crepe was amazing. Nutella and bananna. Unlike German creperies, the woman SMOTHERED it in chocolate.  We complimented her on it, and she replied that if she made it well we'd return, but if she skimped she'd never have return customers.  We talked with her for a bit, and found that there was a great place for soup around the corner.  I didn't eat much of the crepe, as solid foods just didn't seem like a good idea, and decided that vegetable soup sounded much more appetizing.  

After soup, we wandered around a bit more.  I was pretty sick, so I don't really remember much else. The city was really really beautiful, and I definitely want to go there again... But next time, I'll take it easy on the gelato.

Masks for carnival