Jeanette's Blog

First, I’d like to say HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
Now I’ll get into Venice.
We left early Friday morning and after a bus ride to Florence and a train ride to Venice it was 12:00 in the afternoon. Upon leaving the train station, we were surrounded by confetti and costumes and beautifully painted masks. The first thing we had to do was find our hotel, which ended up being very conveniently located around the corner a bit from the train station. Along the way we window shopped at all the stores and bought masks for Carnivale. My mask is a blue and silver butterfly. They range from quite simple to very extravagant and detailed. Venice is known for blown glass and leather goods, and these shops have gorgeous merchandise.
Check-in at the hotel wasn’t until 2, so we made our way to the main square of Venice, Piazza San Marco. This is where most of the festivities were being held in celebration of Carnivale. We crossed bridges and walked along canals and through skinny alleyways following signs that read P. S. Marco. Suddenly and very unexpectedly we stepped through an archway into the Piazza. There was in front of us the enormous Church of Saint Mark. It was built with Gothic architecture using pointed archways and tons of pinnocles stretching to the sky. The church was clad in three colors of marble. It was the center focus of the square.
Around the piazza, stages were set up and small acts of musicians, jugglers, stilt walkers, and actors were doing their best to woo tourists and make some pocket money. Pigeons were everywhere! Tons and tons! Their feathers were darker than the pigeons’ here in SIena. Probably because it rains more in Venice and there’s more sun in Siena. Anyway, I thought I was going to get swarmed, ran into, or pooped on at least a few times during the trip but none of that happened. haha. People were actually paying 1 euro for bread crumbs to attract the pigeons. It worked phenomenally, because the pigeons swarmed to them like magnets on their head, arms, in their hands, everywhere! It was very entertaining, but a bit gross to think about.
We headed back to the hotel to check in, change, put our masks on, and prepare for a night out in Venice during Carnivale. When the sun goes down in Venice, there are lights strung up over the streets that come on and make everything sparkle. We found a place for dinner and learned a valuable lesson about eating out in Italy. We got charged a base fee just for sitting down! Surprise! I paid about 20 dollars for a pizza and a glass of wine. For the rest of the weekend, I ate on the go.
After dinner, we went back to the Piazza San Marco and danced while a jazz band played on the main stage. I went back to the hotel at 9:30, which was early, to plan my day Saturday, read, and write a letter. Saturday, I rocked out of bed at 8 and was off to discover Venice in the morning. I wandered and wandered. I figured out that even when you’re lost in Venice, you’re not really lost because if you just keep walking soon you’ll find something familiar or a directive sign of some sort. Venice is a small city comparitively.
So I put my map away and just walked. I found a fish market and ‘The Most Beautiful Bookstore in the World’. The bookstore was really neat. There was a lifesize gondola in the center that was filled with books and there wasn’t an open space on any of the walls, and in the back there was a port with steps down into the water. I found the Santa Maria dei Miracoli church, the enormous and ornate Santa Maria delle Salute where a couple was getting married and taking pictures, the Fenice Opera House, the hospital, the Guggenheim Museum, and I also went inside the Church of Saint Mark. The church was amazing. The floors were tiled decoratively and the ceilings were high and arched and painted in gold leaf. Everything was very dark from the hundreds of years of candle burning. I could feel a strong sense of history. It was incredible.
I walked from 8:30 until 4:30 in the afternoon and by that time was ready for a nice nap. I took a two hour nap and then got ready for another night of Carnivale. I ate a quick sandwich for dinner and made my way with the other girls to the Piazza to see the acrobat performance. It was way more than I expected. There were eight men flipping all over the place, a woman singing who had a great voice, and they were telling a story. It was one of my favorite things that happened in Venice. A couple of the girls made friends with a couple Italian guys, so after the show we went out with them. They showed us parts of Venice that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise because they were out of the tourist district. It was really interesting… there’s something about Venice that’s really hard to describe. It has a different feeling. We hit up some bars and then I called it quits, but some of the girls pulled an all-nighter!
Sunday, we checked out at 10 and went to the square to watch the famous “Flight of the Angel.” Apparently that was everyone’s plan because we couldn’t even move from the massive crowd. It was uncomfortably overpopulated. The angel was pretty, though, floating from the top of a tower down to the ground. After that we caught our train and headed back to Siena just in time for dinner. A virus is going around our group here and I caught it on Sunday. Maria Pia intuitively had soup ready for us when we got home. It was a perfect ending to the weekend.

Posted by Jeanette at 09:50 AM |