Venice!!

So this past weekend I was in Venice for four days with Robert (good friend I grew up with) and it was fantastic!!  Venice is probably the most beautiful city I have ever seen!  For those who don't know, Venice is a floating city completely built on the water.  It's pretty crazy.  There are canals everywhere and very small roads that you can't drive on so everyone just walks or takes their boat!

We few out Wed. night and arrived in a town on the mainland around midnight.  Since we didn't want to pay for a hostel and it seemed a little late for it to be worth it, we slept at the airport.  It was pretty fun.  There were three other people there with us.  At around 12:20 or so the security guard told us that we could stay here but the airport was closing so we couldn't leave the building.  We were really glad we were allowed to stay since we weren't sure if we would be and didn't know what we would have done if we got kicked out.  We felt very adventurous. 

Sleeping in the airport!

The next morning, after a somewhat restless sleep, we took a bus to Venice.  We first got three day public transportation passes and bought a map and figured out where we were.  Then we just started to walk.  We hit a square/market and stopped for lunch.  We got this really tasty bread thing and had fun feeding the little birds and trying to get them to take the bread from our hands.  Then we walked over to the market part and admired all the sea life that was being sold there.

We continued to walk and ended up by then Grand Canal that goes through Venice.  We walked up and down, admiring all the different boats, from cruise ships to sail boat to sailing ships.  Then we got Gilato!!  Very tasty!!  We also looked at some of the many mask stores and had fun trying on some of the beautiful masks there.  Then we took a water bus (all the public transportation is on the water) around the whole island to see what we wanted to explore the next two days.

That night we checked into our hostel which was very clean and nice.  It was on the long island under the main part of Venice.  We walked up and down it and explored what was around and planned what we were going to do the next two days. We also walked around the shopping area of Venice and listened to some of the musicians playing for the fancy restaurants, some of them were really great!!

The next morning we went to the island beside the island our hostel was on.  We looked at the large church that was there and climbed the bell tower to get a sweet view from up top.  We had one other mission on this island but it was, unfortunately, unfulfilled.  On the map there appears to be an amphitheater in the corner of the island.  We could see the area from the tower but when we walked around to get to it we hit a locked fence.  I suggested climbing it, half kidding, half hoping Robert would be all for it, but he was not, for better or worse and we did not get to see it:(:( So that is still on my to-do list.  But the day picked up quite a bit.

For lunch we had a picnic in a park in the corner of Venice and it was beautiful!! We spent like three hours there just hanging out in the sun and playing on the playground!!  Then we went to The Island of the Dead, which is way more beautiful than it sounds!  It's a small island that was built to be a cemetery.  So the whole thing just had different kinds of cemeteries there.  We weren't supposed to take any pictures but I had to have a least a few so we made sure no one was watching. Then we went back to the main part of Venice and walked around and through the Jewish area.  It was very communal with many people around and kids playing but also signs of past history.  There were memorials and some barbed wire still in places.  It was an interesting visual.

Revisiting our childhood at the playground.

Playing in the park.

Island of the Dead

Then we tried to find our hostel (we were staying in a different one this night) which took awhile but was worth the struggle.  This hostel was very different than the first one.  It was a small house run by a bunch of young Australians with between 20-30 people staying there.  They fed us dinner and we just spent the rest of the night just hanging out.  It was impossible to not meet new people which was awesome!  We met some Hungarians from Cluj and got to know a girl from Australia and two people from Malaysia.  A bunch of people started playing drinking games, which was fun to observe while talking with people.  Apparently it's common in Australia/New Zealand for young people to spend 6 months to a year traveling around the world. Very different than North American culture, but pretty cool.

The next day we brought our bags to the first hostel since we were staying there that night again and went to San Marco, the main square of Venice.  There wasn't all that much to see there actually except a lot of shops and the main cathedral.  One thing that was cool was the HUGE puddles in the area from high tided.  There were platform walkways set up so people could still get around.  I got Robert to take his socks and shoes off and we walked around in the puddles bare foot for awhile, which I loved but I'm not sure Robert did, lol.  We then went to find a theatre that I had seen a poster for and got tickets for the show because I really wanted to see some kind of theatre there.  We then grabbed dinner and went to the show........and it was awful!!!  I've seen better high school shows!!  So that was a huge disappointment, especially since my other theatre idea didn't work either.  But I got to see a bunch of Commedia Dell Arte masks (a kind of Italian theatre I studied in high school) which was really sweet.  Another thing that kind of sucked was that the show ended by 8:30 so we still had a lot of time still and there isn't a whole lot to do in Venice at night if you don't have a whole lot of money. So we just hung out in the common area of our hostel.

Walking through the puddles.

The next day we found an English speaking Anglican church to go to which was really nice.  I really liked the structure of the service.  We did communion and we had to go up to the front and kneel to receive the elements.  After the service a couple from England talked to us for awhile and it turns out the husband has family in St Thomas and has flown into London, ON. Small world!!  We spent the rest of the day just walking around, we read our books in a square for awhile and then took the bus back to the airport on the mainland and waited for our flight.  We got back to Budapest after the trams and metros ran so we had to take a taxi home and it was a really nice taxi!!  It looked like a brand new car and had satellite radio and everything, I was very impressed.

Beautiful street outside the church.

So that was my weekend in Venice. Pretty awesome.  I definitely want to go back there some day.