Ali's Traveling Adventures: Venezia

This weekend I went to the land of gondolas and masquerades, Venice. Venice is by far one of my favorite parts of Italy. I fell in love with it as soon as we left the train station.

Our first goal of the day: find the hostel. Easier said than done. When we arrived, Steven pulled out the map and we began our walk to the hostel. When we finally arrived in the piazza (there is no easy way to get around Venice), we could not figure out where the hostel was. We went around asking at a bank and grocery store to see if they knew where our hostel was, but they said that they had never heard of it. We were a little worried. Eventually we figured out that it was fun by a restaurant in the piazza, so we dropped off our things and headed off to meet the other group of girls that were in Venice.

We all met up at the Rialto bridge, which is basically the Venetian version of the Ponte Vecchio here in Florence. It gave us a beautiful view of the Grand Canal. Hungry, we set off for lunch. I had a delicious dish of gnocchi con ragù, and we were serenaded by a quartet. I also tried Grissini for the first time. With full stomachs, we walked over to Piazza San Marco. At one end of the Piazza is the Basilica di San Marco. At first, it looks like it belongs in Russia, but it is decorated in the Byzantine style. One of our favorite parts of the Piazza was the outrageous number of pigeons. Gross, right? But we had kept some grissini from lunch and decided to feed the pigeons.

Just after putting a little bit of grissini in our hands, the pigeons flocked to us. Before we knew it, they were on our arms and heads, trying to pry the food from our hands.I held one on my arm for a minute, and after it flew off, decided that I should "sanitize" my arm with some Purell. But the pigeons decided that we were not done playing, and decided to land back on my arm. I was rather disgusted, and Steven captured the moment well.

After attempting to take pictures jumping in front of the church, we decided it was time to ride on a gondola. We had exactly six people for each gondola, so it worked out perfectly. We took a thirty minute ride through the canals and learned a lot about the city from our gondolier. We passed by Casanova's home and many bridges, including the Bridge of Sighs. We finished our day, and decided to make our way back towards the hostel and do some shopping along the way. That evening, we ate dinner at the restaurant that runs the hostel and took advantage of our discount. We wandered through the streets of Venice, being careful to not get lost, which of course happened anyways.

The next morning, we all woke up and got ready for the day and headed over to the restaurant for breakfast. While we were enjoying eating outside, it started to rain. Then in started to pour. The only time that I have ever seen it rain so hard was in Jamaica several years ago when I was on a mission trip there. All of the restaurants in the piazza had canopies that allowed people to sit under cover outside, but they were filling up quickly with gallons of rain. We were amused by the restaurant owners rushing to try to dump the water out of the canopy. After waiting out the rainstorm for a half an hour, we made our way to the train station to drop off our bags and buy our train tickets to return home. From there, we caught a "bus" (which is really just a boat that looks like a city bus on the inside) to the island of Murano, famous for glass blowing. It was a very interesting experience, and our group came to call them the "Glass Mafia," since it was a tradition passed down from father to son and the business was run by each family. It was a very strange experience, as I went to buy a glass horse but was told by one of the workers that I should not buy a horse because it would break easily, so instead I should buy him. So I ended up not buying anything from them and found some other nicer and cheaper stores on the other part of the island. It is absolutely amazing what they can do with glass. The chandeliers in all of the stores were breathtaking.