The City of Water- Venezia!

Venice

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Buon Giorno!

Today we traveled to the city of Venezia or Venice. The trip here was very interesting, to say the least. We woke up at 4:30 am to get ready to go to the train station in Milan. Our train was leaving at 6:35 am, but we had to take the time to get over there and get our tickets sorted out. When we finally boarded the train, we were exhausted so naturally we decided to take a nap on the two and half hour ride. However, thirty minutes down the track, the train broke down in a tiny unknown city. All of the instructions on what to do when we got off the train were in Italian, which we have little understanding of. Some nice girls from Portugal helped us and got us on the right path after about 20 minutes of confusion. When we boarded the second train, there was no seats available, so we had to sit on top of our luggage on the floor. After we were on the second train for about an hour, we had to switch over to two more trains to make it to Venice. But when all was said and done, we made it safe and sound!

Venice is wonderful. I have never seen anything quite like it. Everything is a separate island, approximately 117, as we were informed by our Gondolier (more about that in a minute), and those islands are connected by over 100 bridges. When we got off the train, we purchased a very useful map and tried to follow it to our hostel. Keep in mind that we had to cross huge bridges with our full luggage. The streets do not have very good signage, and every time we tried to follow a route, we ended up on some tiny street not on the map. Finally, a gondolier offered us a ride to our hostel, even with our immense load of luggage. We killed two birds with one stone, got to our destination and got to ride in an authentic Venetian gondola! The gondola was very nice, and our gondolier sang to us as he navigated the tricky canals. Without his help we would probably still be wandering the streets of Venice.

Our hostel is actually in a palace built by the famous Morosini family more than 400 years ago. Everyone has been very nice, except that we booked the hostel for one night, and somehow through a mixup in some online connection, they had us booked for two nights. They cannot give us a refund, because we did not notify them 48 hours before of the cancellation. That made us a bit mad, but there is nothing we can really do, and staying in Venice for an extra day and night is not a bad thing at all.

After we settled into the hostel, we made the trek to Venice beach. It was actually very simple, we just caught a water shuttle that took us straight to the island of Lido and from there it was a five minute walk. The beach was extremely crowded, but we managed to find a spot right by the water. The water was refreshing and a bit chilly, but felt good after laying out a while in the warm sun. We rented a small paddle boat with a water slide on top and took that out for awhile. It was very fun and entertaining sliding down the slide while trying to keep the light boat from running into swimmers and buoys.

Back at the hostel, they provided a three-course Italian dinner for us which was very tasty. They planned a group outing to a few bars, but we are exhausted after this very long day, so tonight we are catching up on some much needed sleep!

That's all for now!

Love,

Kalyn