Traveling the World

On the fifth day of June in the year 2005, I can vaguely remember getting off the train. It was a cold day, overcast for the most part, but still a hint of the sun.

Me and my traveling companions Israel and Lisa headed towards the train station exit around 8:30am. Our first thoughts were, “what’s good to eat?” Little did we know that on Sundays, Venice is pretty much shut down. I mean, there was NOTHING to eat. I hate to construct a bad image of the city, but this was our experience. It smelled, the people were very rude and refused to speak English or assist us.

But the city knew there would be tourists like us, even on Sundays, so they had their normal entertainers on the street.

Finally, after wandering around for god knows how long, a woman appeared before us like an angel. ENGLISH! Yes! She asked us where we needed to go, we told her to be honest we weren’t sure, so she told us to follow her. At first we were skeptical, being in a foreign land following some strange woman. But to our satisfaction, she brought us to St. Mark’s Palace/Plaza.

We literally spent two hours in that plaza playing with the pigeons and looking at the little shops and museums and the huge church in the background.

We eventually found the gondola. Ah yes, what is Venice without a gondola ride?!

The ride cost €40 (that’s about $55 at the time) per person, and I was so unbelievably tired from lack of sleep on the train ride, that I fell asleep on the gondola! If it weren’t for my friends I probably would have ended up in the canal with no clothes or possessions.

After this we got some pizza and walked back to the train station. Unfortunately we were only able to spend 14 hours in Venice because our train back to Salzburg, Austria was supposed to get back in time for us to go straight to class. What really happened was the train got back at 4am, and Salzburg doesn’t open until 6 or 7, so me and Lisa were stuck waiting for a bus at the train station for 3 hours. I decided to just go back to my house and skip class