Venice

Uncle Brian called me out and yelled at me a little because I have not yet followed through on posting more of the pictures I took during my European adventures. Here's to you, Uncle Brian!

This post is all about Venice, Italy. I went there at the beginning of December 2007, when two friends of mine pitched in and bought me plane tickets to go with them (Merry Christmas to me!).



So without further ado... I give you... Venice!
To the French, Venice is the epitome of romance. In the same way that we Americans look at Paris and swoon (generally... I'm sure there are those of you reading who disagree), the French look at Venice and hear nothing but the birds and the bees. I was not aware of this, though, until I informed my host family that I was going to Venice for the weekend. "Oh la la!!! Mais avec qui?!" (oh my! who with?!). They were understandably confused, having heard me time and again explain the whole "I'm not interested in dating until I know it's who I'm gonna marry" thing... and then when I told them that I was going with not one, but TWO lovely young ladies they were shocked! After carefully explaining that Katie and Erin were just friends, they let it go... but I totally understood why they were freaking out once we got to Venice.

Such beauty! It's absolutely breathtaking, and old, and classic, and solemn, and whimsical, and everything else you could imagine all at the same time!

Our youth hostel was... interesting. It was more of a community room, with four bedrooms and a common area, with four beds per room. Also, it was nearly IMPOSSIBLE to find! After wandering around Venice for two and a half hours, completely confused by the ridiculous numbering system (one "block" would be 200s, and then the next would be 1300s, for example), we somehow just stumbled upon it while walking down a back alley that we could barely fit in because it was so thin. Oy. But, it was cheap and suited our needs. And from the balcony, we could catch a glimpse of the Grand Canal, so all in all it wasn't too bad.

Mind you, it was only the slightest glimpse of the Grand Canal... but speaking of the GC...

Those are all taken from the Rialto Bridge, one of the three bridges in the city that cross the Grand Canal -- also one of the big touristy areas and the site of my late night singing for money adventures (which I wrote about in a previous post)... but just to rehash:

So at some point in the weekend, we ended up having zero euros between the three of us. What was the solution? I put a beret down in front of me and started singing Christmas carols in hopes that we might be able to get at least a little bit of money so we could eat and get back to the airport. It worked! I made about 200 dollars (130 euros) :)

The rest of this post is gonna be pictures without captions. Venice was... a life experience. One of my favorites :)



Thanks for visiting, faithful readers. My goal is to get the rest of my Europe pictures published here in the next week or so. I'll try to put more up tomorrow evening, so keep on checking in!