Venezia: Part I

Ciao! I am currently sitting in Treviso airport in Venice, waiting for a 20:45 flight. We've been here since 17:00, when we got off our bus from Piazzale Roma, since there is very little to do in Venice besides go to beaches and shop in the five million tourist shops. It's been fun, but both Maureen and I are ready to go back to Paris!

When we arrived on Sunday and grabbed the suitcase, we realized that the next water bus left in ten minutes so we had to rush to buy our tickets and get to the pier. We had a great hour and a half ride from Marco Polo to San Marco, with stops at Murano, where there's a glass museum, and a few other areas of Venezia. Our stop was San Marco, where the main Piazza is, with Saint-Marc and the Palazzo Ducale (Doges Palace), and I'm pretty sure I recognize it from an Absolut ad.

The best part about arriving on a Sunday night was that mass was going on, so people were pretty much filling the square and not letting anyone pass. Since the first part of the directions to the hotel required us to go through the square and under the clock tower, we were forced to go around and get a preview of the wonderfully cheap souvenirs Venice has to offer its tourists. We also passed a ton of places to get dinner, which made us even hungrier than we already were and in a hurry to find our hotel.

While it was a little difficult to find, we didn't have to stop and ask for directions, which made us pretty pleased with ourselves. We ended up in a small square in the middle of a few buildings and a church, with a restaurant and the fountain we were supposed to use as a landmark. We found numbers 593, 592a, 592b, 592c...and 597, when we were looking for 590. After walking around the square in a slight circle, we ended up in front of this random tunnel under a building and saw a sign for none other than Hotel Citta di Milano! We clearly have good luck. We checked in and got our key, though the guy tried to get us to leave our passports with him for a few minutes, and were pleasantly surprised to be given a room with a bathroom even though we'd expected not to have one. While there was no WiFi and the air conditioning didn't work very well, it was still nice enough, so it all worked out well.

We wandered back out to Piazza San Marco to find dinner along the canal, and ended up stopping at this little place where everything was 9€. Every restaurant in Venice has what's called a Touristico, a tourist's menu, where everything is 14€ or 15€, so this was a sweet deal. We had nothing else to do other than get some gelato (stracciatella e menta...delicious) and preview what we wanted to buy for souvenirs, so we headed back to the hotel, showered, and passed out on top of the cover's due to the heat.

In the morning we had planned to meet Walter, since the entire Venice summer program was going to the Palazzo Ducale instead of having class, so we went to the breakfast room around 9:30. The selection was not as amazing as our Rome breakfast, but still pretty good: granola and cereal, tiny packets of cheese, jam and butter for the rolls and toast-cracker packages, chocolate or apricot filled croissants, orange juice and tea or coffee. I took my croissant with me for a snack, and we set off for the five minute meander through the alleys of Venice to Piazza San Marco.

As luck would have it, Walter was sitting on a bench by the entrance with the rest of the class, waiting for Professor Braman to arrive! We bought our tickets and met everyone inside, but the class had been given about two hours to wander the entire palace slash museum, so we had to waste time and wander through it slowly. We met a lot of the girls in the art class, the other class in the Venice summer program, who were drawing paintings for their final papers. Some of the more memorable rooms we saw were an entire collection of rooms filled with swords, funs, and even suits of armor on sculpted horses, a room that supposedly entertained 3000 people with a painting of Il Paradiso covering one entire wall, and the prisons that we wandered through and almost got lost in. There will be humorous pictures on Facebook soon, courtesy of Walter, Maureen and myself.

We managed to use up the entire two hours, but then waited outside for almost another hour because Dan and some kid in the program named Ryan failed to exit the museum on time. Walter let us go since he was going to a Jesuit church with the class, and so Maureen and I spent the next five hours wandering back and forth near the Rialto bridge, searching for the best prices on Venetian masks, Murano watches, necklaces, wine stoppers, keychains, magnets and the like. I am not souvenir shopping in Paris; I think I am pretty much set with Venice.

Around 17:30 we headed back to the hotel to drop off our purchases and get ready to meet Walter for dinner. We met outside of Palazzo Ducale, and when we finally found him he was dumping a water bottle over his head cause something wet had gotten in his hair. It had nothing to do with a pigeon, we think, but he used some antibacterial stuff just to be sure. We then walked half an hour across Venice to this place called Ae Oche, pronounced like "A-OK!" It was fun, and we got to wait outside for ten minutes before it opened. Apparently Walter has done that twice recently.

The restaurant was fun and very Italian, with tons of pasta and pizza options for cheap. I tried a spritz, which is apparently THE drink in Venice, if that means anything. We got gelato afterwards, of course, and then since Piazzale Roma was very close to Ae Oche, we went there to check out prices and times for bus tickets to Treviso for today. It was determined that our best bet was a 16:10 bus from the Piazzale, a full four and a half hours before the flight. Oh well.

Since Walter wanted to show us his island, where his classes are, we decided to fool the vaporetto service by buying one 24-hour pass, so Maureen would have the ticket and I would have the receipt. It was then a half hour back to San Marco to catch the boat, where we had just missed the 21:15 boat and had to wait 45 minutes for the 22:15 boat. The 15 minute ride was awesome at night, as was his island, which apparently houses only the university and a modern art show, which consists of random obelisks, green dog statues, huge chairs and lights in the form of "TO BUY IS TO CREATE" which you can read from out on the water. Crazy.

The first thing Walter wanted to do was find the vending machine, where he decided to buy Maureen and I peach juice to show us how great it is; it was extremely good. He tried to get the last pear juice box, but it was too far back in the row and didn't fall, then got stuck when we tried to shake it out. Oh well. When we went back to the building where his room is, all the art girls were sitting in a lobby drawing, so we stopped to talk to them for a bit before heading across the way. Walter's roommate was sleeping, so he tried to knock on Dan's door to see what was going on and if he could borrow his book to do the reading, but Dan was half asleep and trying to do the reading himself so it didn't really work out. Walter took Maureen and I over to the computer lab so we could check our email quickly before catching the boat back to San Marco at 23:20.

Unfortunately the boat back in doesn't come until 23:50, so we ended up rushing to check our email and then waited around for half an hour on the pier. It was still fun though; we took some more commemorative photos and talked about trips to Notre Dame and apartment troubles and how crazy it will be to be seniors. Walter kept trying to figure out how to make sure we got back to our hotel safely, given he didn't want to catch the boat with us and we didn't have Internet. The best solution seemed to involve a flare gun. When the boat came Maureen and I were the only two people on it, and we sat in the open area in the back and our tickets were once again not checked. No wonder it's so tempting to go without a ticket!

We got back after midnight and went straight to bed, despite how horribly hot it was in our room. At some point during the night the power went out, so the air conditioning cut out, and it was equally gross in the morning. Our plan had been to catch breakfast before it ended at 10:00, then come back to pack up and be ready to leave by 11:00, which worked out well. We left the suitcase in the reception area of the hotel and went to Piazza San Marco to go through Saint-Marc, but we couldn't have backpacks in there either and had to wander to find the left luggage area before we could go in. While it was free to walk around inside, there were about three other things you could do if you paid, so we only spent about ten minutes total in the very pretty church. Maureen couldn't even find a candle to light.

To make the most of our hour without backpacks, we went window shopping on the other side of the Piazza, where the high end shops were. When we finally had to pick up our backpacks, we decided to finish our souvenir shopping and then figure out where we were in terms of time. Half an hour later we had nothing to do and three hours before we had to head to Piazzale Roma, which was great. We had a free entrance to one of four museums around Venice because we'd paid to get into Palazzo Ducale, so we decided to go searching for the Museo Ca' Mocenigo, which was the closest to us and seemed like it would kill enough time. We got all the way over to where the map said it was, and found instead about five alleys that ended in locked gates or piers to the Grand Canal. Only in Venice is the possibility of a road ending in a river a problem. Walter's favorite phrase of the weekend: "into the lagoon..."

Since the failure to find Palazzo Mocenigo killed time either way, we decided to get a cheap lunch, pick up the suitcase, and then head to Piazzale Roma. For 4€ each we got a slice of pizza and gelato; once again, I love Italy. We sat on a bridge to eat and talked about UGBC nonsense before heading back to Citta di Milano for the suitcase.

Then began the long, hot trek to Piazzale Roma, which we had not been looking forward to all day. Apparently when we went to Ae Oche, Walter took us a quicker way, because we ended up walking all the way around the edge of the main part of Venice instead of cutting across it. Eventually we made it and bought our bus tickets, only for the bus to not be there. We sat at a stop and waited for it to show up, and when Maureen went to go check the times a bus did pull into the space, so we thought it was the right one and crossed the parking lot to get on. That bus was for Marco Polo though, not Treviso, so we spent another twenty minutes in the sun waiting for the right bus to come. Eventually it did, and so ended our time in the Italian heat.

I slept on the bus to Treviso, and we arrived at the airport around 17:00, three hours and forty five minutes before our flight would take off. We couldn't check the bag until 18:30, so we went into a little restaurant and set up shop there. Maureen got food and I plugged in my laptop to edit pictures, and we spent the next two hours there before checking in and heading downstairs. The lovely people manning security stole Maureen's laptop lock, despite the fact that she had kept it in her carry on from the US, from France to Ireland and back, from Paris to Rome and from Rome to Venice. Apparently it could enter the country, but not leave it. Clearly Maureen seems like the type of person who would strangle someone with her laptop lock. Using Treviso's logic, belts, necklaces and scarves should also be confiscated for their strangling ability.

It's now about 20:00, and we should be boarding soon, though not before the priority boarders of course. We still have to navigate the mob that is people trying to board a Ryanair flight, get on the plane without it being delayed, get our bag from baggage and get on our Beauvais-Paris shuttle before we catch the Metro to Maureen's apartment. It is going to be a late night, and I'm not even allowed to sleep on the plane because I want to see the Alps!

Tomorrow Maureen wants to study for her final, so I'm waking up late and then wandering into the city to see l'Arc de Triomphe, la Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame, the Tuilieries, the Louvre and whatever else I come across. I may even go into the Louvre, if I feel like dealing with Bank of America again to get money out of my account! Thursday Maureen and I are climbing la Tour Eiffel and going to the d'Orsay, because it's my favorite and I want to go again. I don't know the plan for Friday, but Saturday Maureen has her final and then we might go to the Centre Pompidou and then have a good dinner. And Sunday, it is back to the States! I can't believe my trip is over a third complete.

Le plus demain! A tout a l'heure,
Sam(bam)