Venice

The next morning we were off to Venice. The train ride was around four hours, which was plenty of time to recover from the night before. We pulled into the train station around midday. Because Venice is completely surrounded by water, they only way to get around on the island is by boat. Instead of having a bus system or cars, Venice has kind of like a public boat transportation system called the Vaparetti. The Vaparetti or as we liked to call it for the short the Vap, would take you all around the Island. Just like a metro or a bus line, it has stops where the boats would dock to let people off and on. In order to ride the Vaparetti you have to buy a ticket that you swipe before you can get on the boat, just like the metro. We all bought three day tickets so we could use throughout of tour of Venice.

With our tickets in hand we got on our first Vaparetti and took it to the stop for our hotel. I distinctly remember this first ride because I was amazed at the palaces along the Grand Canal that look like they are just floating in the water. There were bridges everywhere, linking together streets over little canals. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.

Our hotel was decorated in a Venetian style with glass chandeliers and soft pastels and florals. I shared the double room with Andrea, which was a fine room but nothing compared to the triple room that Karen, Jeanie and Victoria were in. The triple had two giant rooms with a queen size bed in one room and two twins in the other with a table and chairs. The bathroom was also quite spacious too. The only complaint I have about the hotel was that every time Andrea or I took a shower in our tiny bathroom, we would flood everything because the lip on the shower would overflow. We made a joke about how just like we flooded the bathroom, Venice also flooded when there was a high tide too. The shower situation was made up by the fact that the hotel had free wi-fi, which seems to make everything better. So far Italy is more technologically advanced than Spain!

After putting our stuff down in the hotel we set out for the center of Venice, St. Mark’s Square. We walked around the square for awhile going into St. Mark’s Basilica, checking out Doge’s Palace, window shopping and just enjoying the Venetian sites. We walked all around the main square and then past the extreme touristy section to a quite street. We found a grocery store on this street and stocked up for the week. As we were walking around we kept our eyes pealed for a decently priced restaurant. Venice is beautiful and unique, but tourist are definitely scammed because everything on the Island is incredible expensive especially restaurants. We settled on a pizzaria called Chin Chin. The name reminded us of the waiter that kept bring us lemoncello shots saying Ching Ching. We all ordered pizzas. I thoroughly enjoyed my eggplant pizza and nothing was fried on it thankgod!

After dinner we headed back to the hotel to put our food down. We went back out afterwards to walk around at night. We walked to the Rialto Bridge, which is the most famous bridge in Venice. Then we wandered back toward St. Mark’s Square to check out the happenings at night. On the square there were string ensembles playing music for the people dining at the outdoor cafes. We quickly learned, after glancing at the menu that these outdoor cafes’s on the Square were extremely overpriced. A coffee alone was around 8 euros. I don’t think any coffee is worth 12 dollars! We also learned that string ensembles and orchestra concerts were very popular tourist attractions because Venice was home to several famous composers such as Vivaldi.