Venice!

May 30, 2009

Rita drove us to the train station this morning, which was really nice of her.  Our train was at 6:27 and I was running a bit late like always so I just grabbed my bowl of cereal and jumped in the car.  Our trip to Venice was a really long one.  We were to change trains twice; once in Florence and once in Bologna.  As soon as we got on our first train I felt something wet in my backpack and when I opened it up I saw that my yogurt had spilt all over!  It probably wouldn’t have been such a big deal if this hadn’t already happened to me once earlier this week.  Grrr!  I had to take everything out and wipe it clean.  My backpack still smells like yogurt.

On our long train ride we met a couple of interesting people.  The first was this really nice girl.  I don’t remember her name but she’s a photography student at a university in Florence.  I saw that she was reading something I started asking her about it.  She was curious that we could speak Italian so she asked us what we were doing in Italy and that sort of how our conversation got started.  I told her I had learned Italian on my mission and then she asked what that was all about so I told her a bit.  I remembered that Hillary had a pass-along card with her so I got her to give it to her.  The girl tried to give it back but I got her to keep it.  The train kept stopping and the girl said

, “Eh, TRENITALIA!”  That got Hillary and I laughing and we let her in our inside joke about our “Trenitalia” and getting stranded at train stations.  After she got off the train, I taught Hillary how to push the pass-along cards.  The other girl that we met was named Beatrice.  We met her on the train to Venice and she actually lives in Venice.  She was really nice and told us places that we for sure had to visit.  I asked her if she didn’t get sick of all the tourists and she said yes very emphatically.  She said that most of the Venice city dwellers spend the whole summer on one of the little islands around Venice or away somewhere else.  She said that her family has a little summer home on an island right below Venice.  Beatrice also talked about how sometimes the natives get so tired of the tourists that they’d push people when they are trying to get through crowds to show their annoyance. 

She also talked about some other interesting things like how in the winter the water gets really high and floods the city streets so you have to roll up your pant legs when you want to go out. 

She said that sirens go off to warn people about this and that’s when you know you’ll be wading through the streets. 

The first thing Hillary and I did as soon as we got to Venice was get lost.  I knew it was going to happen because I remember that’s what happened last time.  So we pulled out her travel book that has a map in it and figured out how to get to Murano.  Murano is an island north of Venice and its where all of the Murano glass is made.  It was really cool!  We took a ferry to get there.  When we were trying to buy our ferry tickets I just went right up to the ticket agent and I was like, “Um, we’ve never done this before, how does this work?”  He was like, “So, you want to go to Murano…what stop do you want to get off at?”  I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t know!  He probably thought I was such a retard but we were seriously so confused.  On the way to Murano we passed the cemetery, which is built on its own island.  Murano looks much like Venice only it’s smaller.  It was fun being there because it was a lot less crowded that Venice. 

There were a lot of little shops that had glass jewelry and glass chandeliers.  Hillary and I couldn’t get enough of it!  Every store had beautiful colored glass made in to mirrors, earrings, lamps, etc.  After we got tired of walking around Murano we went back to Venice and walked through some of the streets.  

We went to the Rialto Bridge, which is pretty famous and took lots of pictures.  For dinner we found this place that had ginormous slices of pizza.  They were so yummy!   It was getting pretty late and we still needed to find our hostel so we walked towards the direction of the train station because that’s where we though we had to take the bus from but then we somehow got lost again and ended up in Piazza Roma which happened to be where all the buses stopped so that was really lucky.  We figured out the busses, bought tickets and got on the bus.  Our hostel was in Mestre, which is a city outside of Venice.  Miraculously we got off at the right stop and ran into the only people on the street who also happened to be nice and the told us where our street was.  Amazingly enough we were really close to the hostel and we were able to find it.  After we checked in I tried to call my fiancé but he was too busy having fun at Disney World.  Hillary had read somewhere on the hostel website that the hostel gave free t-shirts to people who stayed there so she demanded that we get our t-shirts.  Of course all they had left were extra large ones so we both slept in them that night.  We went to bed pretty early, which was good because we wer so tired and we wanted to get up early next day.