Anyway, let's get the story telling started. This will be a several part series because I like to draw the excitement out for you all. Besides, I'll be more likely to come back and blog if I have something to say.
March 27: I went to Manchester with my friend Alyssa and her little sister, Steph. The plan was to go out to the Birdcage that night and I would get up early to meet up with Dave at the train station after his flight got in. We went out, all dressed up and enjoyed a night of drag queens lip syncing to famous songs like ABBA's Dancing Queen and to Dream Girls. Oh and lot of dancing happened. It was a great time.
March 28: Woke up early (before 7!) and got ready to walk to the train station. Called Dave on his cell phone to make sure he got on a train. After waiting what seemed like seventeen hours in the train station, Dave arrived. It was really nice to see him. We walked around Manchester for a bit because our train to London wasn't for a while. Once we finally got on the train, we talked about his flight and I started to freak out about flying. I felt nauseous on the train, which has never happened before. We finally got to London and took the Tube to the station we needed to be at to take the train to the Stansted airport. We spent a few hours walking around London without a decent map, just wandering. We ate the food I packed for us (salami and cheese sandwiches) and decided to catch the train to the airport to check in. We spent the next two hours at the airport playing rummy, which Dave kicked my ass at. The flight was okay except we were with a bunch of Italian teenagers who screamed during take-off when a bit of turbulence made the plane jerk. Dave had passed out, unfortunately, and he woke up because of the screams. But then he promptly passed out again, which made me slightly sad because I was hoping to have a freak out companion. Everything ended up okay. The Italian customs just glanced at me and stamped my passport and let us go. We were in Treviso, a small city just outside of Venice. We took a bus to Venice where it was raining. I had remembered my umbrella and meant to pack one for Dave too (because he was unfamiliar with the whole England=rainy thing) but my backpack was barely big enough for my stuff. Luckily(?) there were guys selling umbrellas on the streets. Clever actually. They wanted 5 euro for it but Dave haggled them down to 3, with some careful lying. We asked for directions to our hotel and trudged through the rain. After we found it and got settled, it was getting pretty late but despite that and the rain we decided to take a short walk to get a few night pictures of the canal.
Then we went back to the hotel, which was down a slightly shady alleyway, to pass out.
March 29: Our first full day in Italy. It was still raining but we didn't let that deter us from seeing things. We got a fabulous map from the front desk of our hotel and we set out after a delicious breakfast that the hotel provided. We wandered just trying to get our barrings in the city. We decided to buy a waterbus pass and we spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to validate the ticket at the waterbus stop. We took a trip down the canal and out to the open sea. When we got off we were near the hospital. We saw the ambulance boats. It was weird to think about but it made sense. What's the fastest way to get to an accident? Through the crazy maze of streets? Definitely not.
It rained all day but we walked all over the place. We found a little restaurant where we ate a late lunch. I had a pizza and Dave ate a fish. It had a face!!
After we wandered for a bit longer, we were tired of being soaking wet so we went back to the hotel to dry off. Our shoes were really wet and mine smelled God awful. They smelled like a dirty foot before (I've had these shoes for easily three years) but after a day walking in the rain, David said they started to smell like a corpse. We took a short nap and I decided I was hungry and wanted to go out to get a piece of pizza from the shop that was just down the alleyway from our hotel. We went down to the front desk to leave and there was a few Brits there, drying their feet. They told us the canal was flooded with about six inches of water. So we walked down the opposite way, hoping to find a way to the main street but there was water blocking our way. So instead of eating, we went back to the hotel and went to bed.
March 30: It finally stopped raining. We ate breakfast and checked out of our hotel and carted our bags around Venice. There were only a few places we really wanted to see because we went all over the place the day before. We went to San Marco piazza and saw all the beautiful architecture.
We decided to go to a museum (the name of which escapes me now) where we played a little game of "pick your favorite painting." It was a bunch of religious art so I had a bit of trouble choosing. We got some lunch at a take away calzone place and walked toward the train station. We had our first taste of gelato and sat in front of the station waiting for our train. We thought we had an hour to wait and we were tired of carrying our heavy bags around so we thought we'd just sit on the steps and enjoy the (finally) nice weather. When it was getting close to the time our train was to leave, we went inside to see what platform our train was on. We found out that Italy had their daylight savings time change and we were an hour late. We were a little miffed but they let us trade our tickets for a different train at no extra charge. We decided to get a bottle of wine to help soothe our feelings of idiocy and anger. We didn't have glasses so we drank from the bottle like a bunch of winos on the bench in front of the train station.
Here's the link to the rest of the Venice pictures:
www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2357925&id=15933734&l=2741889711
Next stop on our Italian adventure: Milan.
