Venice
Friday, December 26th, 2008After my 16 hour train ride from Luneburg to Munich and finally to Venice, I arrived about 6:40am (Dec. 19th), just before sun up. I had to wait for a couple of hours before checking into the hotel, so I decided to wander around. Even before the sun came up, I could tell Venice would crack my list of Top 5 Cities. I crossed the Scalzi bridge and wandered around Santa Croce for a while before finally checking into the Hotel Adua. I got there and my room wasn’t ready, so some other guy who was there offered to let me stay in one of his 3 rooms, which were right around the corner. On the way he asked if I wanted a big room or a small room. I was kind of confused on the fact he thought he had to ask. Before I could respond, he said “For you, Big room!” Ended up finding out that it had two twin beds pushed together and 2 feet of room on all sides. I would have hated to see what the small rooms were.
I ended up taking a nap before meeting Theresa, who was flying to Venice from Hamburg, outside the hotel. We dropped her stuff off in our room and took off. We knew the general direction we were going, south. We figured we’d wander around and find stuff to see. We were kind of right. The alleys ended up being one of the favorites of the trip. It was really fun. We’d go down alleys that we were sure would be dead ends, just to find them lead to awesome squares or major canals. We arrived at St. Mark’s Basilica after dark. We decided to head back to the hotel after getting something to eat and stopping by an internet café.
It’s kind of weird. In Italy, there is a law, supposedly helping to protect against terrorism, pedophilia, and piracy, where you have to register and give a copy of your passport to use a computer with internet access. Plus it is like 3 Euros/15 minutes. Needless to say, internet access was kept at a minimum.
Anyways, after we left the internet café we made a bet on how long it was going to take us to get back to the hotel without using a map. I put the over/under at 3 hours. Theresa thought it would be no problem, so she took the under. It only took us an hour and a half of wandering to end up at St. Mark’s basilica, so heading directly back shouldn’t have been a problem. Unfortunately, for an hour and a half, we somehow got turned around and ended up south of St. Mark’s instead of north towards the hotel. To make things worse, we ran into our own little “Luxembourg Square,” which like our roadtrip in Luxembourg, had it’s own little gravitational pull from which we couldn’t escape. We ended up in the square probably 5 or 6 times. By then we were actually able to read the signs right, and found our way towards the train station and onto the hotel. We ended up at the front door at 3 hours and 2 minutes. I won! : )
The next day we headed back to St. Mark’s Basilica. On the way we found an outdoor food market, so we got some clementines, bread, cheese, bananas, and some chips. Then we ate our feast in St. Mark’s square while being harassed by pigeons. Fucking things wouldn’t leave us alone. They were climbing all over our bags and even Theresa. They wouldn’t even leave us alone when we hit them with the bag of peels, so we hurried up and went inside the basilica. Got to check out the altar where St. Mark’s bones are supposedly beneath. The story says that his bones were smuggled out of Alexandria, Egypt by boat and brought to Venice a barrel of pork. Unfortunately I have no pictures because they weren’t allowed.
We spent the rest of the day wandering around. This time, since we were able to read the signs right, we wandered in a much less lost way. We also sampled some delicious gelato. For anyone in Venice, I really recommend the Nutella gelato. Delicious.
mrnational
