Venezia

Venice seems so long ago, but I have to keep going with my updates...Our stay in Venice was pretty interesting. We wake up that morning and walk across the street to the train station where Peter, our bus driver, pays for our tickets to take the train from our town into Venice. The train ride is about 5 minutes, taking us over water into the train station in Venice. We are greeted with the Grand Cannel outside the train station and begin our walk all the way over to the other side of Venice to meet our tour guide. We think that we are being led astray by Peter as we are walking through narrow streets and over funky bridges. Being led like this through strange cities scares us as we are usually left after our tours to find our way back to the hotels. We finally get the the Doge's Palace in Venice, right by the main harbour and at the main square, St. Mark's, which you might recognize from the DeBeer's "A Diamond is Forever" commercial in which the guy and the girl are twirling in this square and he starts yelling "I. LOVE. THIS. WOMAN!" and the girl, embarrassed at him yelling this out, asks him to stop and he said that this will have to do, presents her with a diamond ring, and then she starts whispering, "i love this man, i love this man." so yeah, anyway, that's where i was. our tour that morning was at the doge's palace, where we had a very rude and, well, i have no other way to describe him...non informational? tour guide. he said some pretty off handed and rude comments to some of our members of our group that left us doing a 'did he really just say that?' laugh. and we pretty much learned nothing about the palace or about the doge's because our tour guide was that bad. what we did learn was that carly was mary magdalene and that jaime's new nickname's are machine gun and pedro...and that pedro has 26 kids. interesting. afterwards though, we went to a glass blowing factory and had a demonstration which was the coolest thing i have ever seen. it was absolutely amazing how the glass blower easily molded the glass into a vase. then we went upstairs where they tried to sell their venician glass to us poor college students. it was still quite the experience. returning back to the outdoors of venice, crystal, carly and i walked around venice doing some shopping and eventually we were tracked down by a gandola operator who we paid 90 euros for a ride. he was pretty funny...he ran all over the place just to get his gandola for us...we wanted to yell out to him as he hopped from gandola to gandola to get to his, to calm down...we weren't going anywhere! but we had an amazing gandola ride where we saw the bridge of sighs, casanova's house and marco polo's house. we got to wear our gandola dude's hat and take pictures with him. it was definetly worth the 30 euros i paid. next, the 3 of us, after much confussion, boarded a vaporetto (water bus), which took us out to the island of Lido, where we met much of our group out on the sandy beaches for some fun in the sun. Sand castles were built, sea shells were picked, and let's just say that a bunch of us girls decided that, once we were far out in the Adrianic Sea, that we were far enough away from anyone else so spontananity took place and we went skinny dipping. it was pretty wild. don't worry...suits were put back on shortly afterwards and before we returned back to being able to touch the bottom of the ocean and before shore!

at about 5, we all broke up, heading our separate ways to get back to our hotel. My group (Nic, Crystal, Carly and I) grabbed some gelato (mmmm...ice cream) before finding our water bus. Once we reached the grand cannel, we did some shopping and then boarded the train for the way back. I met up with other people from our group back at the hotel and heard what everyone had been up to that day. Crystal and I ate some wonderful chinese food at a place across the street and then I retreated to my hotel room, turning in early for the night...which didn't last long as jaime came and asked if i wanted to go on a night time gondola ride with a small group. not wanting to turn down an adventure, i went with. grady, fallon, crystal, jaime and i headed back into venice with a time limit...we didn't want to miss the last train back to our hotel. once there we easily found a gondola ride and a reasonable price and where on our way. fallon sang madonna songs the whole ride, hoping that madonna would answer back to her as she has an apartment in the city. many stars do have apartments in the city, as it's one of the most expensive places to live. we sat and joked around and asked our gondola dude questions, but he didn't speak much english. once back on ground, we stopped for our last taste of real italian gelato, which was wonderful. we then retreated to our train, which we had a great deal of fun finding...it might help if we spoke the language...and went back to our hotel, to pack up and get ready to leave for austria the next morning.

gondola rides for the day: 50 euros. or about approx...$65 ish dollars.

don't worry...it was well worth it!