Venezia

After little planning and lots of “maybes,” I finally ended up in Venice this past weekend. Friday turned out to be John Cabot University day in Venice, I went with five other girls, and two other groups of people we knew, including some friends, ended up getting on the 6:50 a.m. Roma to Venezia train with us.

After five hours of listening to my ipod and napping, we arrived in Venice a little before noon. We ended up eating lunch and hanging out at a great little restaurant for two hours while we waited to check in to our hostel. Everyone’s food was absolutely amazing, despite creepy wait staff. The restaurant seemed to be a local hangout, so it’s cool we randomly picked such a relaxed pace with great food.

After lunch we checked into our hostel, which ended up being great for the $33 we paid each. It was a really good location, right near the train station in an area with lots of shops and restaurants. We had two clean private rooms, each with their own bathroom. The rooms were tiny, and the shower was hilariously not its own contained unit, so it drained right into the floor next to the toilet. The best part was that the hostel had really great air conditioning, which I welcomed with open arms.

We spent the afternoon aimlessly wandering around. Even though I bought a map, we didn’t use it too much. We went through tiny little alleys and walked along canals and over beautiful bridges. The entire city is so gorgeous it’s unreal, the place literally looks like a movie set. I kept expecting Heath Ledger dressed as Casanova to jump across roofs and canals over my head (Casanova isn’t actually a good movie, but if you like Heath Ledger you should watch it.)

Before dinner, the six of us decided to take a gondola ride, even though it wasn’t cheap (100 euros split six ways). We had a tattooed gondolier who was really nice and told us a little bit about the places we floated by. It was so relaxing and beautiful, such a cool way to see the city. At one point our gondolier pulled to the side of the canal to meet his friend who was waiting outside of his restaurant with a beer for him. One of the girls jokingly said we needed six more beers, so our gondolier yelled to his friend and pulled the boat back to the side of the canal. His friend came out of his restaurant to deliver us six beers. We paid him 2euros each, and went on our way. I loved it.

We went to dinner at a great restaurant called Vesuvio near our hostel that was so good we went back for dinner on Saturday also. On Friday, we decided to eat outside, despite ominous rain clouds. The food was great, but halfway through our meal it started raining, then pouring. My back was exposed from under the overhang, a few of us were getting soaked so eventually we moved inside, along with the rest of the al fresco patrons. Everyone was wet, but smiling, and our gorgeous waiter Fabio kept everyone fed.

Friday night we went to Campo San Margherita, which we heard was a cheap area for good nightlife. It ended up being a big open area with a bunch of bars and lots of young people, a lot like Campo di Fiore where we hang out in Rome.

Saturday consisted of a complimentary breakfast of a water bottle and good, though unidentified, pastry. We spent the morning shopping through Venice with two more girls from JCU, eventually finding our way to the Rialto Bridge and then Piazza San Marco, which was absolutely breathtaking.

The piazza is named for the enormous and beautiful church that sits at one end. I don’t know much about it, since the line was so long we didn’t have time to enter. I have heard the inside is even more beautiful than the outside, which is elaborately decorated with all different colors of marble, brightly colored paintings, and tons of statues. My pictures definitely don’t capture this breathtaking church. The rest of the piazza is lined with gorgeous old buildings, including a huge clock which shows the phases of the moon, along with the time and lots of other things I don’t know about. We stood staring at San Marco for awhile, before attempting to make our way back towards the hostel for dinner. We got pretty lost and spent half an hour walking in a circle, ending up back at the piazza. We took a little while to regroup and study the map, then Venetian mask-shopped our way back.

The brightly colored, often glittery Carnevale masks are all over the city. They may be my favorite thing about Venice, especially since they are more reasonablly priced than I anticipated. There are plenty that cost a fortune, and clearly those are the most ornate and gorgeous, but I picked up a few for myself that I think are amazing, and it didn’t cost much.

Venice is full of glass from Murano, another island nearby. Shops in Venice sell tons of beautiful glass jewelry (I bought myself a really cool tiger striped ring), decorative figures, frames and sculptures.

I found that people in Venice spoke better English than people in Rome, which I wasn’t expecting. I’ve been trying harder to speak more Italian, now that I know the basics, but it was really nice for people to completely understand me (the woman checking us out of our hostel is excluded from this category). Most menus were in Italian, English, French and German, which I thought was really cool. It was both tourist-friendly and really interesting to see the menus in all of the languages.

The meals I had in Venice were also better than the ones I had in Rome (except the food we make ourselves for family dinner). I can’t explain why, they just were.

I really enjoyed the Venetian environment. There are no cars allowed in the city, so it was incredibly peaceful, despite the droves of tourists. It was really nice to be able to hear yourself think, there weren’t any pain-inducing emergency vehicle sirens constantly wailing past you or Vespas zooming by attempting to run you over. It was nice not to have to play chicken with cars, which you tend to have to do on the winding streets and alleys of Rome.

Venice was breathtaking and a really great weekend away, but it’s not the kind of place I could live in. It’s a city revolving around tourism, I need a more thriving ccommunity to keep me occupied. I would love to spend some more time there, since our weekend was more about the atmosphere than seeing any of the well-known museums and churches that fill the city.