Day in Venice

First off: I promise that I will update this thing more often!! ARGH!! It's frustrating that I do not keep up with this enough!

Now. Venice was amazing. We first arrived and every one wanted to put their bags into storage so they wouldn't have to carry them around all day. Being the rebellious one, I said screw that and decided to take mine along with me. There was only one point through out the entire day that I regretted that choice and it was when we were going into the basilica at St. Mark's square. They wouldn't let me in - bastards.

But Venice was tight but it started off on a bad note. We were waiting in line to get tickets for the 9:05 train to Venice and it was about 8:55. We were in front of the ticket office which was two stories below the train platform. Well, we found out that we could just get our tickets on the train so we booked it for the train. We eventually got on the train and settled down. That is when I wrote the previous post. When we arrived in Venice, we did our normal head count. "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. DAMN IT! We lost someone!" Turns out that we left Rob at the station in Milan. He was unable to keep up with us and no one even noticed that he was gone until Venice. Sorry Rob, but it was kinda your fault cause you are so damn quiet. Oh well. We booked our tickets home on the long train to Florence right away. There was supposed to be a high speed train but apparently it does not exist any more (thanks trenitalian.it for lying to us!).

Well, while everyone was checking their bags. I decided to roam around a little. Since they were taking an extra long time, I thought they were eating some food, so I decided to do the same. I can honestly say that I have had the worst pizza ever in Italy. Pretty sad huh?

But we finally met up after everyone's crap was checked and we set out to explore. We pretty much set out for Saint Mark's Square, the popular tourist spot on the opposite side of the small city. Normally this is supposed to take about 20-30 minutes to get there, it took us about 2.5 hours. We were not in a hurry though. We stopped for lunch, stopped for pictures, stopped for snacks, and eventually stopped for a GONDOLA ride. This was pretty freaking awesome. I never thought that I would be on a gondola in Venice. Since there were 10 (yes, 10, one stupid chick didn't want to be social) of us, we split up 5 and 5. My gondola had Angelica, Jake, Stella, Zim, and Me. It was absolutely surreal that I was on a gondola with 4 people that I just met less than 10 days before but have become very good friends with. We saw a couple neat bridges, some amazing water ally ways, and even the house that Marco Polo (Fish outta water!) lived in.

We actually ended the ride a little early in order to get to St. Mark's. After snapping a few photos, we just started to explore the area a little. Nothing spectacular here. I did a little gift shopping here (yes, I have already done Xmas shopping) for the family. We eventually took a water taxi back to the train station as everyone was sick of walking. This was pretty awesome as well. The people in Venice are magicians with these boats. They are better at driving the boats on moving water than most people are at driving! Pretty crazy stuff.  We eventually made it back, I snapped about a 100 photos on the water taxi ride alone, and we set off for Florence.

All in all, it was a pretty amazing weekend. I snapped about 600 photos too. Venice is by far one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen.