Venetian weekend

So, the hostel that the other girls in our group got--turned out not to be such a great idea. The hostel itself wasn't really that bad, but it was more of a camping site rather than a hostel. There were rows of tiny little trailer-camp style cabins, and then rows of tents you could rent. There were several things that bothered me about the hostel--for one, they were dishonest in their advertising. On their website, they advertised an hourly free shuttlebus to Venice. This was not the case at all, and at the front desk they said that was just the bus from the airport to the hostel.

Secondly, everything there cost money, and when it all added up, the total cost of staying there was equivalent to staying on the islands of old Venice. We had to use a charge card to pay for anything we used at the camp, and we had to add value to the card before we could buy or use anything. For instance, we had to purchase our own towels. When I tried to remove the price tag from mine, (the tag was the sticker kind), doing so tore out a bunch of threads and essentially made a big hole in the towel. When we were getting ready for bed after we'd come back from dinner later that night, we realized that we were next to an airport--our little cabin trembled violently every time a plane took off from the runway next to us. Since I'm really sensitive to vibrations while I'm sleeping, this didn't really help me rest at all.

The biggest issue with the hostel though, was that it was far too much trouble to get from the hostel to Venice. The hostel was on the mainland, in suburbs around Venice, and it took a good 35 minutes to get there by bus (and then you have to take further transportation via water bus to get to certain areas on Venice). By the time we'd gotten settled in after arriving at the hostel, taken a shower and tried to catch a bus to Venice, we also discovered there was a curfew for the hostel. To get back from Venice to the hostel, one has to catch no later than 10:25 P.M. a bus from the main piazza in order to get to the airport, in order to catch the bus that goes from there to the hostel. Confused yet? By this point, we (Kate, Natasha and I) decided to cancel our second night at the hostel and we went ahead and got reservations at a very small but nice bed and breakfast in a rather nice little area of Venice. The difference per person? Six euros. So anyway, Friday night--we had JUST enough time to go to Venice, eat dinner there and then rush to catch a bus to go back to the hostel.

The next morning, we checked out of the hostel with great enthusiasm. After dealing with the two bus changes to Venice, we went straight to the edge of the historic part, and found a little place to eat breakfast. This turned out to be really fantastic--the owner of the breakfast bar also owns a restaurant, and a bed and breakfast. He offered us cappucinos, orange juice and assorted pastries for five euros apiece, and it seemed fair enough, so we took it.

Out on the walkway by a canal, we ate and there were several sparrows watching us eat. I decided to put a piece of bread out on the wooden fence along the edge of the walkway, but just as soon as I'd set it down, the bird swooped in and took the crumb from my finger. Before we knew it, there were a half dozen sparrows watching us, tentatively waiting for food. So when the owner came out with a photo book of Venice for us to sign--it was full of signatures from tourists over the years--in lieu of just a signature, I doodled a little drawing of a cappucino, piece of bread and a sparrow. When the man came back out and saw the drawing, he was so pleased that he went back into his bar and brought out a brand new picture book and insisted I draw something on the front page of the book. I ended up drawing a complicated cartoon of a girl eating pastries with a nervous expression on her face, surrounded by 20 or so sparrows intently watching her. The owner was so ecstatic that he hugged me, kissed me on the head and brought me a complimentary small glass of strawberry wine. When we paid for our breakfast, he insisted that if I come back with Wendel (when we are married) and our four or five children, we would get the "family room" in his bed and breakfast. It was really a nice and very charming interaction with an Italian and one of my better individual experiences here in Italy.

Afterabout a couple of hours, we managed to track down our little bed and breakfast. They provided us with towels, a nice little sink in our room, two comfortably sized beds, a television, air conditioning and a little shared bathroom out in the hall. It was all clean and very nice for the price. It was really cute, in fact, and it was within 15 minutes slow walking distance of the Piazza of San Marco (one of the major tourist areas of Venice). Kate left Natasha and I to spend time with an Air Force friend serving in Italy, and Natasha and I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around slowly, looking at the beautiful canals that crisscross through the entire city, the picturesque buildings, the cliched gondola men, lots of Murano glass shops and the Piazza of San Marco.

Because we really didn't get to our hotel until 1:00 in the afternoon, we only had a good half day to explore Venice. There was really no time to do anything serious, so Natasha and I focused on the Piazza of San Marco--a large and crowded but beautiful collection of buildings which includes two great Renaissance and Gothic palaces, the magnificent cathedral of San Marco, a very large and tall bell tower (campanile), government buildings and other assorted odds and ends. We just spent time ambling around and I pointed out various interesting architectural aspects of the buildings to Natasha, who was polite enough to put up with my artistic enthusiasm. We did get to see one very neat and famous feature in the piazza--the Four Tetrarches, which I almost missed at first because it's not in a readily apparent part of the piazza. There were a lot of really famous artistic sights I wanted to see in assorted churches and museums throughout Venice, but again, just simply not enough time. But this SHALL not be my last trip to Venice.

Venice really wasn't difficult to figure out--once you orient yourself on the map in a very prominent location such as the Piazza of San Marco or the Rialto Bridge, then it's fairly easy to get around. One piece of advice we kept hearing was to allow yourself to get deliberately lost in Venice, and it's actually true. We learned quickly not to buy anything near major tourists areas--the shops in obscure back streets gave you the best deals on jewelry and glass. Venice was just really lovely and one afternoon was nowhere near enough time to explore it properly--we couldn't even go into the cathedral in San Marco Piazza because the whole place was flooded with tourists (it was Saturday, after all). There are also a bunch of islands nearby with famous sights on them--cathedrals or glass making factories, but again, there just wasn't enough time to go out and see these things. We still had an excellent time yesterday though--we at least got to taste the flavor of Venice.