We first went to Venice, and I'm just going to start with a picture, because it's an incredibly beautiful city and my description won't do it justice:
That image is of the Grand Canal, and yes Venice is completely full of canals and Venetians can use them as a form of public transportation. It is very expensive to take a boat taxi though, so most people just walk everywhere. There isn’t a whole lot for a tourist to do in Venice, and there isn’t as much history as in a city like Rome, so my friends and I were content to just explore on foot. On the first night we ended up doing a lap of the entire city, mostly because we were looking for a good bar to hang out at. We were somewhat successful, but during the night it began to rain, a lot. Of course, since we were walking around with no real direction, we got lost in Venice in the pouring rain. We spent awhile running around in the pitch-black night asking for directions, all while getting drenched to the bone. (Venice closes early, we learned). We finally found a nice Italian girl who happened to speak English, and she walked us most of the way back to our hostel, where we eagerly dried off and went to bed. All in all, we spent several hours in the rain, and I maintain that is one of the more fun and interesting nights I’ve had.
If you thought our water troubles ended there you would be wrong. If you don’t know, having canals running through a city makes it very prone to flooding, and when we awoke the next morning, we discovered over a foot of water in the lobby of our hostel! The hostel manager had warned us that flooding may occur but it’s such a regular occurrence in Venice that most citizens have learned to live with it. For us American students however, a foot of water in a hotel lobby is not a normal sight.
Fortunately, the water soon subsided and we were able to go outside and begin another day of exploring. We quickly discovered that Venetians put raised walkways in the city in order to make it easier to walk around, as portions of the streets can still be flooded long after the major floodwaters have subsided. Again, it’s just a normal occurrence and most think nothing of the walkways at all as they traverse through the city. While walking through the city, besides marveling at the leftover floodwater, we went to visit St. Marks Square, (yes that’s the English translation a main attraction of the city. It’s basically a huge piazza with a Church at one end, and it looks really cool when it’s flooded, check it out:
In addition to the square, we saw the Rialto Bridge, which is the largest and most famous bridge in Venice. As you can guess there are lots of bridges to get over the canals, but this one is clearly the largest and most extravagant. Here it is:
Overall, Venice was a great place to visit. While there isn’t a huge array of things for a group of college students to do, it was interesting to see how a group of Italians who are so different from Romans go about their daily lives. Most people are kind and helpful, let’s face it, to them, an American tourist is a welcome site compared to several feet of floodwater. The city itself is the most unique I’ve seen, and it has a charm unmatched by any other city that I visited. I recommend it to anyone traveling through Italy, even if you can only be there for a day. That’s all for this post. Next stop. Bologna!
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