July 16, 2005
Day 14
Today was our full day of Venice!
It was awesome!!
I woke up this morning and felt like crap. I couldn't breathe all night because my sinuses and nose were stuffy and I had a sore throat. Now my throat is sort of feeling better but I still can't breathe out of my nose. :(
Oh yeah! I never wrote about last night once we arrived!!
Okay so last night the train pulled into Venice at about 10ish because it makes so many stops. We get off and were so excited because it totally looked just how we pictured Venice to look. It was beautiful and calms with happy little tourists wandering the shops. So we start walking down the first road we come to because the hotel is supposed to be right by the train station. We go up to a restaurant and ask someone for Hotel Piave and he is like "no, no Hotel Piave in Venice. Hotel in Mestre." and we're like.... huh.... so we didn't even know what he said! So we run back to the train station and ask another guy "Mestre?" and he says "Yes, 10 minute, train S". We find train S and above it does not say Mestre but we ask one more person and they say yes so we get on and sit forever and wait for the train to turn on. Forever was probably 10 minutes as the guy said, but we were nervous. No one checked for tickets so we basically rode for free - it was only 1 Euro so oh well. That seems to be happening to us a lot.
We get off at the first stop which was Mestre and the first street we see is Via Piave! Good! But we're starving because we've hardly eaten all day and nothing is open because it's 11 at night. We find our hotel and get up to our room. It's kinda crappy but not dirty or anything so it's okay. Not beautiful like the Milan rooms, but you get what you pay for. The only bad things were the teeny tiny shower and the really flat pillows on hard beds. And cold tile floors.
We went back down to the front desk to ask the guy if there was anywhere to go eat and he said no unless we want to walk down a few blocks to the pubs. What choice do we have? We started walking and we saw a lady standing on the side of the road wearing black high heels and a short black skirt and she had really big hair. Yikes, our first prostitute encounter! We started walking really fast. About a block later we saw a pizza place that looked open so we went in and got pizza and some wine. It was about 11:30 or 40 and they closed at 12 so when we were about half done, they were putting chairs away and really wanting to kick us out. We finished up the wine and headed back.
When we went back into the lobby the guy at the desk saw I had a pizza box in my hand and he asked us if we wanted some beer. We were like "nooo, water!!". So he gave us a big thing of water and then he said he could make us a Venetian Cocktail. We had one and then went up to bed.
We slept until noon and then headed out for our first day of Venezia! Like I said, I was really not feeling well so it was hard to feel excited at first. We walked all around and did a lot of shopping and picture taking! There are also things going on in the streets like musicians, guys from Africa selling fake designer purses, people that look like statues with the Venice masks on, and also lots of beggars. Not as many as Milan but we saw the worst one here; it was a guy with arms only down to his elbows and he was sitting there waving his stubs around and yelling things in Italian. It really sucks seeing all these poor people and I wish I could help them. But If I helped every one I saw I would become one too because I would run out of money!
I really wanted to take a Gondola Ride while we were there so we found one but it was 80 Euro. We ended up doing it anyway because you can't really not do it. And guess what? It totally wasn't worth it! He took us down a bunch of side streets so we didn't get to see tons of big cool things. We did see a UPS boat though! That was funny. After that we got dinner at a place where you get all the "courses" for only 13 Euro so we were definitely excited. It was really good for the most part. I got lasagna, roasted chicken, salad and fruit salad. The fruit salad was from a can so that was sad. I went to Venice and all I got was this canned fruit salad!
After dinner we went to San Marcos Square for the festival. It would have been cool but there were just SO many people there that we were shoulder to shoulder even though the place was huge. We took a bunch of pictures because the buildings were beautiful. It was so hard to be in that big crowd because we were all carrying a bunch of stuff from the whole day of being out. The fireworks started and people literally started charging forward toward the water to try to get a look at them. They were apparently shooting them off from an island so we really couldn't even see them. People were seriously running and pushing like they had never seen fireworks in their life! So we stayed for a little bit but we decided to just go back early to avoid the rush of people leaving. The festival apparently lasts into Sunday! After the fireworks they go to this island and party on the beach and then go swimming at sunrise! I can't really imagine that would be that much fun with so many people though. We went back to the hotel and went to SLEEP.
