PART III: VENICE

PART III: VENICE (Wednesday – Friday)

Venice was a breath of fresh air. After checking off a list of places to go and things to see in Rome and Florence, we arrived in Venice without an agenda, and it was fabulous. It was dark already when we arrived on Wednesday evening. The train basically dropped us off on the water and we had to find the correct water taxi (vaporetto) to get us to the island that our hostel was on. Our hostel was a pit. It was sick. I don’t even want to talk about it. Let’s just say it was motivation to get the hell out every morning and to stay out until curfew every night. We explored the main island a little bit that night and then headed straight to Murano the next morning, where we saw a few glass blowing demonstrations and bought a lot of glass. We returned to the main island and proceeded to get lost in the tiny streets and numerous canals of Venice. We didn’t buy a map in Venice. We just wanted to get lost. We shopped for a while that day; I bought a Venetian mask, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. We were propositioned for a gondola ride, but we denied it even though the gondolier brought the price down from 80 E to 60. Our pockets were already feeling a little too light. We saw San Marco briefly – the hordes of tourists were terrible. We then took an elevator to the top of the Campanile (San Marco’s bell tower), which is the location where Galileo tested the first telescope. The view was yet again astounding, and we made an American friend…an older woman from New York who was desperate to talk to someone. We received the condensed version of her life story from the time we got in line until we rode the elevator back down. She scolded us for learning French instead of Chinese, which I thought was hilarious at the time, but now that I’m back, I’m starting to think she was right. Other than being overly ignorant, loud, and offensive, she was pleasant.

The following day, Friday, we explored the Peggy Guggenheim museum. It was weird to end a week of Italian renaissance masterpieces with a bit of modern art, but hey, when in Venice… Her collection included pieces by Picasso, Pollock, Kandinsky, and Dalí. It was pretty different, but very educational, nonetheless. That night we hopped a plane to Paris, but as with all of our experiences with public transportation on this trip, it wasn’t without a mishap. To make a short but embarrassing story shorter, let’s just say we ended up at the wrong airport and had to pay yet another 60 E taxi ride to get to the proper airport before our flight took off. No worries. Someone here is a stickler for leaving way too much margin for error in her travel plans because she knows herself extremely well, therefore we still ended up being 90 minutes early for our flight. I am a Topping after all. We don’t travel without situations. We got into Paris late that night and headed back over to Kelly’s cousin’s apartment. The next day we wandered around a little, ending up at Montmartre on the steps of Sacre Coeur. We lazed around all of Sunday until catching our train back to Cl-Fd, and now I’m here, wondering what the hell I’m doing here.