Venice

We Ubered to the train station in Rome because the buses were so unreliable and got on a train to Venice at 7:35 a.m. We arrived in Venice around noon. My first impression of the city was that it looked exactly the way it was supposed to but didn't smell as bad as I'd been warned it would. Our first order of business was finding lunch. We sat outside and ate pizzas with delicious strawberry and sparkling white wine cocktails. Then we lugged our suitcases through the uneven streets of Venice and up stairs to cross bridges. The weather was really nice, though it became hot with the exertion of hauling our luggage. We eventually made it to our Airbnb. The floors were tile, and the ceilings were tall, exactly how I had expected Venice to look. The listing had said the bathroom was shared, but because the Airbnb was two rooms, we assumed that meant shared between the four of us. However, the Airbnb was part of a mini hotel-like complex with several rooms, and the bathroom was shared between two of those rooms. It was fine for a night, but we were glad it was only one night.

We spent some time exploring the shops and streets of Venice, peeking into many of the city's glass stores. Italy has a rule that you can't go inside churches with uncovered shoulders and knees, and we'd decided we weren't really going to do churches in Venice, so we were all in shorts, tank tops, and sundresses. When we got to the Basilica San Marco, we could only look at the outside. The pictures of the interior on Google are magnificent, so I'm a little sad we didn't go in, but at the time, none of us needed to see any more churches, and the outside was more than enough. We also saw the outside of the Doge's Palace, renowned for its architecture. From what I remember from art history, the structure of the palace's layers, thinner at the bottom and thicker at the top, was revolutionary at the time of construction.

At 5:30, we had a gondola ride. I had thought I was only booking a thirty-minute ride, but the tour company also included a mini walking tour between the meeting point and the gondola loading dock. There happened to be a French family in our walking group that had requested narration in French, so our guide said everything in English, then repeated it in French. This was a great coincidence, especially since we'd all gone so many days without practicing our French. Our guide explained a little bit about the history and construction of Venice. The entire city is apparently built on wooden posts that are prevented from oxidizing by being shoved deeply into a certain kind of sand. There used to be thousands of gondolas in the city, and they were all colorful and beautifully decorated. At a certain point, they were standardized by being required to be black, with specific metal ends in a design representing the city. Now there are only about 400 actual gondolas in Venice, and they're primarily used to give rides to tourists. It was five people to a gondola, so our group shared a boat with a woman in her late twenties from Ohio who was solo traveling in Europe for a month. She was fun to talk to for the thirty minutes as we drifted through the canals. The ride was over too soon. This was probably my favorite part of our entire trip.

After the gondola ride, we treated ourselves to dinner at a relatively fancy seafood restaurant. We'd been grocery shopping and cooking dinner for ourselves for days, so we wanted to celebrate the end of our trip by going out. We shared a shellfish platter and bread as an appetizer. It was a little hard to order the main course, as the way things were stated on the menu wasn't always clear. Allison and Regan both wanted lobster, which looked like it was only 9€, a steal. But it turned out it was 9€ per 100 g, and the waiter said the lobster that day was about 500 g. That would have been a 45€ lobster tail. They decided to share a scallop pasta dish instead. Vanessa and I planned to share a shrimp risotto dish that was marked as min. 2 people. We assumed that meant the dish was big and meant to be shared. The waiter then informed us you had to order a minimum of two of the dish, for a total of 50€. So we ended up getting salmon pasta.

The next morning, we slept in again and checked out of the Airbnb at 10:00 a.m. Then it was back to carrying our suitcases around Venice. We had coffee at Coffee Joint, which was essentially an Italian Dunkin' Donuts. I had a caramel latte that was too sweet, and the others got pastries or donuts with their drinks. We went to more glass stores because Vanessa was looking for a specific kind of necklace. Around noon, we arrived at the train station and picked up sandwiches. I ate half of mine in the station for lunch and saved the rest for dinner on the ride home. We transferred trains in Milan. After only a thirty minute delay due to another train having some mechanical issues in front of us on the tracks, we made it back to Lyon around 9:00 p.m. It was strange and relieving to be home after so long.