Weekend in Venice

Venice is amazing. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the city is completely engulfed with water. There are no cars. The streets are waterways. The cars are boats. People walk everywhere and everyone is fit. There are very few overweight people.

I tried several different styles of panini. The bread is so fresh and the meat is so flavorful. Every meal comes in courses and lunch generally takes about an hour. Most people have a beer or a glass of wine with their meal. Clocks are hard to come by. It is very easy to lose track of time. The infrastructure of the buildings was unbelievable. Many of the buildings were over a thousand years old! Much of the weekend was spent touring the museums. These museums are home to some of the oldest and most beautiful artwork and sculptures in the world. The night life consisted of fancy dining in an absolutely enormous piazza. A band played classic italian type jazz music while hundreds of people dined under large umbrellas on a huge shared patio.

The first night:

After walking around for a while, a group of about ten got bottles of wine and sat along a very scenic point where a 25 million dollar yacht was docked just off the shore. A taxi boat shuttled guests to a boat party until about 3 am when we decided to call it a night.

The second night:

We wandered the streets and bridges and narrow walk-ways and alley-ways until 3 am. I tried a new drink called absinthe which is an extremely powerful type of liquor. A late night excursion ensued after a few glasses of wine. Cyle, Kelsie, Bianca, and I randomly hopped on a ferry to Lito Beach (on a nearby island) when everything closed in Venice at around 1am. Everyone else went to bed. We had no idea when the ferry would come back or if it would ever come back. The adventure led us to a late night "snack bar." We have been talking about it all day!

(On a side note - a large group of us went on a "gelato tour" last week and tried several different flavors of the italian ice cream. It is incredibly more delicious than ice cream!)

Today I am back in class and my italian is getting very decent. I am working very hard to learn the language and I am using broken italian to speak with the locals more regularly. Later this afternoon I will be going on a wine tasting tour at a local vineyard. I have my second italian quiz tomorrow. Accessing the internet is very difficult now and I will be posting the 160 photos and 6 videos shortly.