We arrived in Venice quite late that night, so we settled in to the new hostel. We are staying in another camp ground, in another tent. However this time we have been lucky enough to have the tent to ourselves. Once we had settled into our tent, we stumbled across some of the friends that we had made in the Wildschonau Valley, and we all had dinner together at the camps resturant. Harrison and I had our first real Italian pizza! It was pretty good. We have been told that the pizza will get better the further South we go, so we are looking forward to that. The camp bar/pool was throwing a pool party that night, so we all settled in by the pool to watch the festivities.
Harrison and I were tired from travel, and our friends were leaving early the next day so we didn't have a very late night.
Our camp site is fairly far out of Venice, so to get into the city you need to book a spot on a shuttle bus that drops you off at a train station, that allows you to get into Venice. So the next day we got up and headed into Venice! We had been told that when in Venice, you needed to face the fact that you would get lost. The streets are really tiny and windy, and everything looks very similar. So we did get lost a few times! We started by heading to St Marks Square. It took us about two hours to get there! Not just because of the fact that the streets are full of people and difficult to navigate, more due to the fact that every street we turned down there was something to discover. We went into all sorts of different stores. I was particularly captivated by the beautiful Morano glass stores! Morano glass is made in a small island in Venice (obviously called Morano) and is colourful glass made into all sorts of incredible things. We saw jewellery, plates, cups, photo frames and tiny animals. It was so beautiful, and so amazing! Apart from the glass there were also so many different food stalls around, selling some of the biggest pizza slices I have ever seen! We stopped along the way at a gelato shop called Grom, and got our first real Italian gelatos! I am a huge fan of ice cream, so I had really been looking forward to being in Italy. And this gelato did not disappoint! It was the best gelato I have ever eaten in my life! It was really amazing.
The buildings in Venice are all so old; but not in a decrepit way, in a truly beautiful way. They have such character to them. Then of course there are the famous canals. There is something so magical and romantic about the canals, I loved the small ones hidden between buildings.
We had been told that Venice is really smelly, but we didn't really have an issue with that. Every now and then we wandered down a street that smelt fairly bad, but other than that I didn't find it particularly smelly.
We finally arrived at St Marks Square, only to find that a lot of it is currently under construction! There are scaffolds up in front of and inside a few of the buildings.
We were quite disappointed, as the scaffolds and what not took away from the beauty of the square. We didn't spend too long there, rather opting to get lost in the small, beautiful streets of Venice. Walking along the grande canal, we came across a cute resturant where we decided to have lunch. We shared a pizza, and ate next to that canal under a large umbrella covered in beautiful flowers. It was quite romantic!
Our last task of the day was finding our way back to train station. This proved to be somewhat harder than expected, and we ended up getting more lost than we planned. However in the end we made it back. Unfortunately we didn't get the opportunity to ride in a gondola, as I had hoped. It is just too expensive on a backpackers budget! It will definitely be something we come back and do one day.
Once back at the hostel, a storm settled over Venice. We were very lucky, as the rain started just as we arrived back at camp. We had dinner at the resturant again, this time opting for gnocchi and lasagne. Harrison's lasagne was really good, but my gnocchi was not the best. But I guess what can you expect from a camping grounds resturant, serving hundreds of people a day. Once finished with dinner we dashed through the rain back to our tent, where we spent the rest of the night.
Today Harrison woke up and wasn't feeling very good, so we decided to take it easy. We had basically seen all we wanted to see in the city the previous day, and we weren't willing to push Harrison too hard as we don't want him to get sick again! We spent the day sitting around the pool reading and chilling out. Tomorrow we are hoping to get on the bus to Rome. I say hoping, because the bus is actually full tomorrow and we couldn't book a seat since we had to shuffle our days around because Harrison was unable to get on the bus. The guide on the day had assured us that busabout would be able to book us a train to get where we needed to be if we couldn't get on the bus. However, after a few emails going back and forth it seems that isn't really the case. So tomorrow we will get up, and hope that two people don't show up to claim their seats on the bus. Otherwise we will be making our own way to Rome tomorrow.
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