Last Days in Italy: Venice

Aside from the Vatican, Venice was my favorite city in Italy. I feel in love as soon as I saw the first canal. Our hostel was really nice and easy to find, but the first thing we did was get lost! Apparently this is the thing to do in Venice, so we got a map, to help us find our way home eventually, and headed out into the city. Another thing that made me fall in love with Venice was seeing a BILLA, which is a grocery store. Believe or not, it was the first grocery store that we had seen and we were beyond excited about it! We went back every day we were there to get real Italian food and save some money.

For our first full day in Venice we decided to island hop. The public transportation system in Venice is made of water buses, so we bought a day pass and got on. We knew we wanted to see Murano, the island that is famous for its glass, and San Michele, the cemetery island, but other than that we were excited just to explore. It took several tries to figure out the water bus system, but we were masters of it by the end of the day. The island is covered with little shops selling the glass that is made there. We even the the chance to watch a demonstration of how to make glass. San Michele was a beautifully peaceful island. There were graves of countless people in all different styles. I loved wandering amongst the graves, reading the names and wondering what the people were like. In addition to Murano and San Michele, we saw Lido, which has a beach with the Adriatic Sea.

On this day, Meg and I realized that we had not been properly enjoying Italian desserts, so for dinner we decided to a "pastry crawl" in order to sample as many different sugary delights as our stomachs could handle. We decided that everything needed to be under a euro a piece, or 3 euro if we were going to share it. Eating so many special creations was wonderful, but as we went we decided to have something a little bit more substantial and got some pizza to help absorb all of the sugar.

We ended up spending an extra day in Venice because we could not get on the bus that we needed. So our second full day was spent wandering on foot. Unfortunately, the city had experienced a lot of rain so many of the little streets were flooded! We explored as much as could and observed how true Venetians dealt with the water. It was a great extra day!

Traveling back to Poland was a long, exhausting affair that included a bus, two trains, and a sleepless night. However, the experiences I had in Italy were totally worth it. I had a Christmas adventure unlike any other, and I feel blessed for having such a special trip.

Blessings,
Colleen