Wow, its been a while. Finally I have all this figured out and have so much to update on. We’ll start where I left off – Venice. Now, Venice is quite beautiful. Its odd because they basically use the rivers at streets. I probably saw maybe five cars the whole day we were there. We started off the day by catching a water taxi from the train station to a part of town Jim stayed at when he was there last. There is a beautiful bridge where I snapped way too many pictures of the canals. From there, we headed into the streets, walking and wondering. There were so many shops. Eventually we stumbled onto the main square where there is a tall bell tower that has collapsed multiple times, a large palace, and one of the coolest cathedrals I have ever had the pleasure of going into. We went into the cathedral first, and it was truly spectacular. There were mosaics everywhere, but, unfortunately, no pictures were allowed. The most unusual thing about the church: the floors. The floors waved. Literally. There was about a one to two foot difference between the heights of the floors due to the water filled ground below. To say the least, it made me rather uncomfortable and worried about the strength of the structure. But is beauty outweighed that, and I continued to stare all around me at its beauty.
After the Cathedral we headed next door to the dopo’s palace. The Dopo of Venice was basically like a super elaborate mayor…I think. His palace was remarkable (again, no pictures allowed inside). There were massive paintings and golden crests. Oh, and a fireplace in every room, because that’s clearly essential to life. It was quite interesting to see it all.
After we jumped on the water taxi to visit one of the islands of Venice. When we got there, we realized that the church we wanted to go to was actually closed. We walked to another church, which was alright, but stood incomparable to the previous one. We then headed back to the mainland to catch a train back to Bologna.
The next day it was off to Verona…also known as the day of unlucky. We decided to sleep in since we were all tired, meaning we missed the earlier train we had planned to catch. This change put us about 2 hours behind schedule. We arrived in Verona only to find out that our car rental wouldn’t be available for another 2 hours because the place was closed for lunch for 2 hours. The panic began. My parents had organized a surprise trip to a winery and we had to be there by 3, which wasn’t looking possible with the current circumstances. We walked down the street, found a place to eat, and I got onto the internet on my phone to find the number of the winery. Luckily, we got it all arranged, picked up our car, and made it to the winery (after getting a little lost, but we made it). The winery was rather interesting. We learned all about the process of the local wines, saw the machines and barrels in which they are kept, and tried three very different forms of their wine. Afterwards we took a drive to one of Europe’s largest lakes, Lake Gardi. It was rather beautiful, and very gigantic.
We returned to Verona where we took a quite tour of the city, heading straight to the city centre. Honestly, it kind of felt like Disney world. It was almost too cutesy and picturesque. In Verona, though, there is Italy’s most intact Coliseum. We didn’t have time to go in, but the outside was quite astonishing.
After all of that, we hopped back on the train and arrived in Milan around midnight. We finally got to our lovely airport hotel around 2 am to get about 3 hours of sleep before it was time to head to the airport to catch our flight to Athens. Not so lovely, but when travelling, one has to go with the flow.
Jessica
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