"Oh Jana gets into Venice at 11!"
"Oh look! The cheapest flight gets into Venice at 10:30."
And so I booked it.
And now I have decided something.
First, I never want to fly into or out of Gatwick or Stansted again.
Second, it is not a good idea to need to be at a European airport for a 7:30 flight.
Now I don't know how public transportation even really works at home since I never use it. I've got my trusty car. My car that I miss very much even in our short time together. My car is a symbol of freedom. It can take me to steak and shake at 1:00 in the morning. It can take me to Walmart at 2:00 for the ink that just ran out of my printer or for poptarts or whatever I needed that I didn't think to get during the day.
But England does not have a 24 hour lifestyle. And I miss it! There is nothing like American convenience.
So I left Bath Spa train station around 10:30 P.M. the night before...
(I'm pretty sure this was the latest train that left Bath for London.)
and I got into Paddington station and the underground had JUST closed. Which was the route my ticket had said to take...but there was a bus to Victoria Station.
But the bus doesn't drop you out directly in front of Victoria.
So I walked around with two guys trying to find it.
Then we got there and it was closed. The gates were shut. There was no way to get in.
Well at least we had an hour before our train was supposed to leave (I think they actually leave every hour.)
So I was freaking out a little. How were we supposed to get on the train if the station was closed, which, why the %$*# was the station closed?!?! THIS WOULD NOT HAPPEN IN AMERICA EXCEPT ON CHRISTMAS AND MAYBE NOT EVEN THEN! Haha.
But yeah they let everyone in about 10 minutes before the train was supposed to get there. There were about 50 of us hanging around Victoria station waiting to get inside I think.
So I got to Gatwick with relatively few problems.
Slept until 4:30 when the machines turned on so I could print out my boarding pass. I have something to admit actually...there were already people sleeping on the bench so I slept on the floor. *face of shame* Checked my bag on. Slept in the main part of the airport. Gatwick is odd though, they don't tell you what gate your plane is departing from until like 5-10 minutes before it's supposed to board. Made me kind of nervous because that just makes it seem like nothing is organized.
The flight itself was nice. I sat next to an American couple who were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary and I think they had some kids around my age. I know they had a daughter named Sarah so that was pretty interesting. And I remember they'd been to Indianapolis for a Colt's game. That's really all I remember about them though. Oh and I had a window seat!
So I got into the airport and there was like, no customs. You could just walk through. I think the guy in front of me did just walk through. Well I wanted a stamp on my passport so I made sure to show mine to the guy and then I collected my baggage and waited for Katie. It took me like an hour to find an ATM because they didn't have one on the first floor, it was on the second. Bought a Venice Pass for like 22 euros. (which we really didn't need since they never checked tickets on the waterbusses, called vaporettos.) Bought a pepsi. Katie's flight got in at 2. Jana missed her flight. Jana told us to find the waterbusses so we asked the information booth how to get to them (even though Jana had given us instructions) and we ended up taking a bus to venice so that was a bit weird...I was able to call Lorenzo, the guy that was supposed to give us the key to our apartment, with my England-bought phone so that was all good. We met Lorenzo but then he had some family thing to do so we wandered around the market stalls and some streets near San Marco's before getting to our apartment. I got some mint gelato. It was good. It wasn't rainy but it was cloudy. Oh I also bought Brian's postcard (I get him one from every city I visit) and decided to get him a cloudy one since it was an accurate representation.
It was a nice place. Katie was practically obsessed with the coffee press. She probably has a picture of it. There wasn't any wifi though.
I took all these photos from the same location on the couch in the kitchen:
Katie and I decided to go cheap for dinner since we didn't know our way around very well either. ("Jana will want to eat out the rest of the nights anyway and we might as well use the kitchen while we have one.") We just got a frozen pizza and wine and salad and I got an apple. Oh and chocolate. The salad dressing had an extremely weird taste. It took us about thirty minutes to get the wine bottle open. It was quite an ordeal.
And that was day one.
The next day we got up a little late. We had about an hour and a half to kill. Jana had told us to meet her in San Marco's square. It was raining and I bought a poncho. We decided to take a waterbus down the Grand Canal but we got on the wrong one but still ended up on the North end of Rialto Bridge. So we were around 15 minutes late for Jana and we finally found her about like, an hour later. We took her back to the apartment. We were hungry but we went to the Bell Tower in San Marco's Square and saw a wonderful panorama of Venice. My poncho ripped open from the hole from my neck I think in the wind (because I didn't think to take it off), so that was a waste of a few euros. Oh well.
And really we saw a lot of cool stuff. We didn't go into St. Mark's Basilica but we saw the outside (which was under construction). We walked to Ponte di Accademia. I was really confused this whole time, because I thought were were looking for a cafe or some place to eat and we just kept walking and Jana kept saying we were going to the Accademia and I had no idea what she was talking about, I especially didn't know it was a bridge. Anyway so we crossed over to the other side and saw the Basilica di Santa Maria dell Salute (or just the Salute for short, which translates to "the Health"). We then finally ate after that. I got salmon penne and it was like heaven in my mouth. And then I was confused about whether you had to pay for water and I got water instead of wine or beer but I just went with it. Jana was under the impression that I didn't like beer. I'd say I'm definitely used to the taste now and like it quite a bit. :)
We took a vaporetto to Ponte di Rialto and walked over it and then we went back to our apartment and rested some. Jana fell asleep and it was very hard to wake her up for dinner but we managed it. We went back to San Marco's afterwards and discovered acqua alta, or "what those random boards everywhere were for." We didn't get caught in any flooding but our favorite route was cut off so we did have to go around out to the waterfront to get to San Marco's at night. A few people were there but it was mostly empty since the weather was crap (cold and rainy) and it was a bit late. Then we went back to our apartment to prepare for getting up at 4:30 in the morning...I was not too happy that we'd have to get up that early at the time, but now I'm glad we got the full next day in Florence.
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| Rialto Bridge |
More pretty pictures on facebook. If you want to see good pictures of Venice I'd just look them up on google, it was rainy or at least cloudy when we were there any way, so my pictures aren't going to compare.
Also I thought I should mention the city of Venice is in the shape of a fish.
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