Our European Adventure

We arrived in Venice at about 9am and were greeted with the Grande Canal the moment we left the train station. So great! The first thing we noticed about Italy is that people are helpful! After France and London, this was a nice change. People speak English and don’t try to make you feel guilty (although they still only say, “Little bit” or “Oooh, I’ll try,” when you ask them if they speak English. Liars).

Venice is gorgeous. We couldn’t quite get enough of traipsing over the cute little bridges and staring out at the gorgeous canals, with families’ washing strung up over them and gondoliers desperately trying to coax customers to take a ride underneath. We took a LONG stroll through lots of backstreets and looked at lots of cute little shops selling glass items (name any object, and they have one made of glass in Venice). We saw plenty of cute little churches with bell towers and intricately carved doorways. We didn’t need much else to occupy ourselves!

Ended up straying so far from home we couldn’t quite get ourselves out of the rabbit warren and caught a vaporetto back to the hotel. Grabbed some warm clothes then headed out to eat near the Rialto bridge. Enjoyed a lovely meal right next the canal (which was thankfully, less stinky than we imagined) and attempted to navigate our way through the streets. The occasionally dodgy sign pointed us the way but we got pretty lost and by time we were about halfway all three of us were busting for the toilet and frantically running from street to street. It was definitely a “relief” when we finally found our way back, with the help of some American tourists and their Italian friend. We tried our best to get to bed early in anticipation of a great day ahead, but getting to sleep has never been easy for the three of us… sigh…