Travel Week: Venice

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

My week of travel was spent with my best friend, Lindsay. We have known each other for 16 years and luckily she is on a trimester schedule at school, so she had the week off to come spend it in Europe. So our plan was to go to Venice, Granada, Cordoba, and the Alhambra. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the last three cities they are in the southern region of Spain. Now why would we choose three random cities in Spain over Madrid and Barcelona? It is because of the history, culture, architecture and hey why not?! Also, Lindsay just spent the summer in Ecuador honing her Spanish skills and she really wanted to go to southern Spain. Since I needed a translator I just went with it, although I ended up having a blast! Some background on Lindsay and I, we took a senior year trip and traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland together. So both of us are more experienced travelers than other people our age.

Venice:
I met up with Lindsay in the Marco Polo-Venice Airport and had THE perfect timing, I probably only waited for 3 minutes before she came out. It was pretty epic! We then hopped on a train to get into actual Venice rather than mainland Mestre area. We were lucky enough to find a very reasonable priced hotel to stay in. If anyone is planning on travelling to Venice, stay in Hotel Bernadi. We ended up paying 35 euro each per night with breakfast included. The first night we wanted to take it easy since Lindsay had major jetlag. We just started walking around Venice and we actually ended up walking off our map. So it was quite interesting trying to figure which way to turn to get back to our hotel. We eventually made it back to our hotel and we ended up passing out around 8.30. Both of us must have been extremely tired because our alarms woke us up around 9 the next morning.

We wanted to make our way to the major tourist attractions because in our senior trip we spent a grand total of 4 hours in Venice. We realized that we did not see anything last time so we bought the museum pass and we saw: the Correr Museum, the Doges Palace, Basilica of San Marco, Bell tower of San Marco, The friary church (not sure about the name anymore), The Rialto Bridge, and the Grand Canal. I loved walking through the Doges Palace, it was amazing to see the gold ceilings and the intrinsic detail in every room. If you come to Venice you MUST see the Doges Palace. We walked around everywhere, and I cannot even count the number of times we walked down dead ends. Although, I think the appeal of Venice is getting lost. When we first walked to the Rialto Bridge it took us around 40 minutes to find it but when we walked home from dinner we were at our hotel in 5 minutes after passing the bridge. It is amazing that such a short distance could take so long to find. Lindsay and I are more directionally challenged than others. My sister always loves to joke around with directions some of her normal questions are where is Lake Michigan from Waukesha? I used to end up saying well it depends on which way I am looking, but now I have learned that I am supposed to say Lake Michigan is East of Wisconsin. Or the other question was where is Florida in comparison to Wisconsin. So everyone has realized that directions aren’t my strong suit in life. Even amidst the confusion of Venice it was a great start to our travel week!

My next entry will be about my travels in Spain! Sorry for the randomness of these posts, I have been swamped with papers, exams and group projects.