venice

grand canal

two blogs in one week. gotta be a record. so i'm going to give you a little run down of our trip to venice last weekend which was a wonderful time, kinda cold, but very interesting. we got up at a very early hour (3:30 a.m. to be exact) to catch the 4:30 train because it had the lowest price and we all made it successfully. the good thing about going at that ungodly hour was that there weren't very many people on the train so we got to doze on and off for our 4 1/2 hour trip north.
my advice if you are traveling in a foreign country: if you decide you want to take up two seats during your trip because there's enough room to and you want to put your feet up, make sure your shoes are off or on your own bags, not making a mess all over their seats. you might get a gripey old man checking tickets at 5 a.m. and he might start yelling at you in a foreign language for being ill-mannered and disrespectful and threaten to kick you off the train for making the seats dirty. that may or may not have happened to a couple girls in our group.

once we finally got to venice, it was cold, but beautiful. chi found us an apartment for the weekend in the center of town for a really good price for 7 of us to stay in and the sweet man who owns it met us at the train station to walk us there. we unloaded all our stuff and set out to brave the cold. we found carnevale masks (see pictures below) and also found this restaurant that was pretty much under a bridge and away from the touristy areas. we are used to restaurants being chill and everyone taking forever to eat but this restaurant was loud, and our waiter was very pushy and wanted to get us in and out of there as quick as possible. despite that, the seafood was very very good. it's also probably important to note that since venice is built on a bunch of different islands and connected by bridges, it is much more difficult to navigate than florence because there are even more twists and turns and street names change every other second. luckily my roommate and bestie katie can decipher any map and helped us get around town so kudos to her.

for those of you like me who did not know exactly what carnevale is: it's an annual festival that starts 58 days before Easter and ends on fat tuesday, the day before ash wednesday. so, like mardi gras i guess, minus the beads and debauchery...at least we didn't see any...

more festive carnavale garb

after walking around and seeing the canals, we were exhausted so we went home to take a nap and made dinner at home. our friends chi and tiffany went museum hopping all day and told us about the delicious hot chocolate they found and it made all of us want some so we went and found one of the only restaurants open around our apartment (venice shuts down early…) and had some post-dinner hot chocolate. when we got up the next day, we were expecting it to be snowing since that's what the forecast told us but instead it was just cold and later, extremely windy. we wore our masks everywhere that day and walked through san marco to see what was going on with the carnavale happenings and it made for some great people watching. they go all out. afterwards, we thought we might go see the guggenheim museum across the grand canal but knew it was a long walk so we decided to take a gondole. it was a nice ride minus the driver (or whatever you call them) being a little too pushy about letting him take us. going on the canals was great, but once we hit the grand canal, it was like hurricane winds and i legitimately though we were going to tip because of all the waves. we had our ride cut short and ran to the guggenheim museum to check out some modern art. so cultured, i know.

our carnevale masks!

san marco

that night, we went out for dinner and tried the two drinks that are very popular in venice- spritz and hot wine. we liked the spritz…hot wine, not so much. we peaced out early the next day and hopped on an earlier train than we were planning on so we could get home because we saw all of venice we wanted to see. we all made it on, but after we switched trains in bologna, we were met with a little bump in the road, er, tracks. when we were going through a tunnel, we started hearing this really loud noise that sounded like hail and it lasted a few seconds, then stopped, then started again a few seconds later. it startled all of us and we didn't know what that noise could have been. while we were still going through the tunnel, we started slowing to a stop on the tracks, in the pitch black, and waited for close to 3 hours while the people who worked on the train ran back and forth through all the cars telling us it was going to be okay and we could leave again soon. we were sitting in the second to last train car and when the other people on our train started going to the car behind us to see what was going on, we found out that rocks or something (we still don't really know what it was) broke holes in some of the windows in the train cars in front of and behind us, shattering the glass. how that happened, we still have no idea, but we got to hang out in the train until they finally let us go to the next station that was only 10 minutes away where we all got off and piled onto the next train that came by. always have food and water and a book to read or SOMETHING with you when you are traveling on a train in case something happens and you have to chill for a few hours in the middle of a dark tunnel. still thanking Jesus that nothing too serious happened and also that we got to have some great conversations while we were waiting to figure out what they were going to tell us to do.

so glad no one was sitting in this seat when the rock shower happened. this is just one of the few windows that got broken while we were traveling home.

so that was a little longer than i anticipated so there's the venice update and maybe one of these days not too long from now, i'll update again :) ciao!