Venice

We left Vienna on the night train and shared a box/room on the train with a couple from Argentina who were on their honeymoon. Pablo and Julieta were very nice and we talked with them a really long time before going to sleep early in the morning. We arrived in Paris around 8:30 in the morning. We parted ways with our friends and immediately regretted not getting their contact information. We picked up the Rolling Venice Pass which gave us unlimited public transportation (by boat of course) for 72 hours and it gave us discounts on a lot of other things like museum tickets. Then we started walking down the busy streets having no idea where we were looking for wifi. We saw a sign for a McDonalds so we started following a trail of signs through the city which led us to the only golden arches in all of Venice. We looked up the address for the hotel we were staying at and then took off again through the city. We found the hotel which was basically a hostel but it was better for two reasons: it was clean, and we had our own room. We were very thankful to have free wifi at our hotel. The only problem was that it was only available in the lobby/courtyard, which was a pain because it took forever to climb the stairs and walk to our room to get our laptops. Once we got there we then turned around and walked right back to where we came from. We sat outside while on our computers because the hotel didn't have air-conditioning. I collected A TON of what we think are mosquito bites but they are humongous and I'm ready for them to go away. We decided to take a nap once we got our room and after we had caught up on the sleep we had lost on the train, we went out again to check out the town, this time without our backpacks. We were starving so we went in search of some “authentic” Italian food... let's just say that after this meal Hunter and I ate cheaply the rest of our time in Venice. The city isn't very large so we were able to see most of it by riding around on the water buses. One night we just hung out near St. Mark's watching the busy tourists as the city died down. We even went to Murano, a neighboring island famous for their glass-work. During our two day stay in Venice we saw a lot of the tourist hot spots within the city. Some that we saw were St. Mark's Basilica, the Accedemia Museum, and the Jewish Ghetto. These parts of Venice were awesome but the city itself was what I enjoyed the most. All the water with boats going here and there, the sometimes very narrow streets that can make you feel as if caught in a maze, all of the old buildings each with its own character but similar to the last; these are just some of the things that gave Venice a certain allure I've found nowhere else. As far as I'm concerned... Venice is the best city ever! The city is beautiful and though you probably already know this... it's sitting on the freakin' water! Another nice thing about the city is that there is no traffic to worry about while walking around because its all in the water! We woke up Wednesday morning and headed to the train station. We barely made our train having about 5 minutes to spare. We both were a little sad to leave Venice but we had a hard time justifying those feelings when we thought about the fact that we were heading to Rome!