Short but Sweet – 2 days in Venice

[2016-08-01: Florence to Venice]

Today we woke up really early to get to the train station, for we were going to Venice! We got into to the train station and found out that our train was delayed by 60 minutes. Luckily for our Venice stay, we didn’t have to be on time for anything. We waited about 30 minutes only to see that our train was now delayed by 120 minutes; later it rose to 218 minutes of delay! There were many trains got delayed. It was very confusing at the whole station.My mom asked one of the info employees if we could change to a different train. And she said you may try. So we did. We went to Car 5 of the new train since that was reserved for those like us who wanted to change train.

After some time we got to our destination. We walked out of the train station and found it was right on the water line. Cool!

We started walking with our luggage (I was armed with two backpacks) to our hotel. Although, our hotel was not that far away, we had to drag our luggage over many bridges. There were no streets, so we couldn’t take any car. We were offered a porter service for €20. We disagreed with the price. So we continued on our way. Then guy called us back and we negotiated a preferable price. We tirelessly walked to our hotel and got settled in.

Despite the fact that our train made us lose that much time we still had time to check out the city. We went out and walked around. It seemed as if the boats here were the cars of Venice. I think that every household in Venice must have at least 1 form of water transportation. We saw some houses and buildings with a temporary wall to prevent floods when the tides came in.

We saw many gondolas. I was wondering whether they would have a gentle ride as it looked like they would just be banging against other gondolas the whole time.

We got a 24 hour water bus ticket so we could go around seeing the city. We took the boat to San Marco square. There were two columns closer to the ocean than to land. Both columns had a statue on top, one had the winged lion of Venice, and the other was a statue of Saint George over a dragon. I wonder why the lion is the symbol of Venice, I thought that cats hated water. At night, the Square had many bands playing. Also, there were drain holes that led to the ocean, but when the time came up, the ocean water would create puddles at the end of the pipe.

We walked around and decided to go to back near our place for a gondola ride. It was very nice. We were at a peaceful spot were no other gondola drivers went. We had a beautiful ride, and the gondolier recommended us a restaurant too.

We then had dessert at a Magnum store. You could design whatever ice cream you want! As I ate my Ice Cream, I realized that even now it was still light out!!

2016-08-02 Venice

When we had breakfast this morning, the birds were trying to steal our food all the time. I think that they were the most aggressive I had ever seen. We got onto the boat that took us to an island where a church called San Georgio had a tall tower which had a good view of the city. The city was beautiful, we also saw a huge bush maze, but we couldn’t get there. We then were about to leave, and I was pretty sad, for it was only a couple minutes till’ the bells up here rang. But, a few steps away there was another balcony. We gazed at the view for some time, when the bell rang!! The tower seemed to vibrate every single time the bell rang. We immediately pressed the button to go down and escaped before our ears blew up. I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be so loud.

We then went to the Rialto Market. We were hurried across the Rialto bridge so fast that we didn’t even realize it was the Rialto Bridge. We went to the market mainly for the fish, but was late and the fish section was only fish guts, and seagulls. We had a different lunch instead. We then were walking home, and found a bakery with all sorts of cookies, we got the famous pastry Cannoli, and some cookies, my mom said,
“look they even have biscottes”

the store manager replied,
“In Italian biscotti means cookie, so everything in the shop is a biscottes.”
That is very different from the biscottes in America.