The Venice Chronicles

This weekend, Melanie and I went to Venice to have a look around, and to have some Gelato. We chronicled our experience, and thought we'd share. It's kind of choppy because we wrote it bit by bit along the way. Enjoy!

Friday, June 10, 2011

~First Train for Saturday fully booked: No space for Mel n Kris.

Saturday, June 11.

7 am:

~Second train: Wrong freaking Bahnsteig. Don’t worry, we were 40 minutes early and still missed the train.

~Got new tickets, and 40 Euro later, we were sitting on the Bahnsteig, waiting for the next train, when Melanie discovered bird poop on the inside of her jacket. It’s gonna be an AWESOME TRIP!

~We’ve cleaned up the mess with baby wipes and hand sanitizer to the very best of our abilities, and we saw some kids show up with full-on backpacking gear, and two moving dollies carrying 13 cases of beer. And one water bottle. Nice, guys. Very nice.

10 am:

~Things are looking up:

We’re sitting on the train to venice, munching on the snacks we bought while we were waiting for the train.

The ticket-checker was kind, and even wished us a nice weekend!

2:45 pm

~We arrived in Venice. On the way down, we had to change trains and then ride a bus. The bus ride was crazy!

We met some Irish girls who are studying in Linz, who were similarly to us, not well prepared for the trip. Just like us, they had no idea where they were going to stay the night, and had no real plans for the day. They wanted to tag along with us, but instead, we just gave them the name and address of the campsit we were thinking of staying at, and went on our merry way.

The most interesting part of the bus ride, though, was the mother with her two children, who were on their way to Rome for the son’s birthday. We spent an hour or so talking to the mother, who told us her story, about how they were going because the son’s (Leo) biggest birthday wish was to see his father, whom he hadn’t seen in years, and didn’t have so much of a picture from him. So the mother gathered her two boys, jumped on a train, and made arrangements to go visit Leo’s dad. She didn’t even know if he was going to show up, but didn’t have the heart to disappoint her son like that. So, off they went. Her other son, Felix was about 11 months old, and was absolutely adorable. Felix’ dad lives in the same city as the family, Graz, and his dad has only seen him twice. Apparently, shortly after he found out that his girlfriend was pregnant, Felix’ dad left and married someone else. It was an eye-opener for me that I am luck

y in so many ways to have the life that I do. Leo and I spent a long time playing rock paper scissors, and making concoctions of espresso and dairy creamer. It was rather gross, but he enjoyed the taste. :/

6:00 pm

~Well, it took us a few self-guided, „get-lost all over the place“ city tours to find a hotel for the night, but we got one. It’s got holes in the wall, and well, other problems.

~Dinner=fail! Freeze-dried tortellinis and canned mushroom risotto with some no-name brand garlic salt... we’ll have something better tomorrow.

~Good news!!! Our hotel is right by the San Marco Church, we think.

11:00 pm

~Good news, confirmed! Our hotel is close to San Marco.

The hotel literally has holes in the walls, but that just adds to the ‚pick-up-n-go’ adventure. Two stars? I’m afraid to find out what one star would look like...

~We went to San Marco Square and it was FANTASTIC! It was twilight, and bands and string quartets started playing at the street cafés.

~We saw the San Marco Basilica and the Palace of the Doges from the outside, but couldn’t go in because they were closed for the evening.

~We jsut got home and looked at a map of Venice to see how much ground we’d covered during the day. Yeah... We went to almost every quarter of the city.

We saw a da Vinci display that portrayed all of his inventions, the Grand Canal, a thousand bridges and side canals, tons of plazas, and lots of other cool things, just by walking around for a day.