Venice

This month starts my crazy travel schedule. I returned from London today, and I leave for Budapest on Thursday night. The following Friday I'm going to Madrid, and the weekend after is Barcelona. I really hope I can stay healthy, so I'm loading up on vitamins right now. I wish I had a blender so I could make smoothies. They might not actually help my immune system, but Jamba Juice has made me think they do.

To finish up with Mom's visit, I need to tell you about Venice. My tendencies to motion sickness made Venice less enjoyable than Florence for me. We stayed on Giudecca, which is a little island right across from San Marco square so we had to take the Vaporetto to get to the main islands, and when the ocean was choppy it took me a little while to feel right. Other than that, I really liked Venice. The atmosphere is very different than any other Italian city I've been in. I feel that if I go back with a boyfriend or husband I'll have a much better appreciation. It's mysterious and romantic. I understand why so many artists are inspired because the light is almost magical and there are so many places to get lost or sit and watch everyone walk by. The best example I can give of this is when mom and I were walking through St Marks after dinner and we heard bands playing, almost competing with one another. While we were listening, the brightest moon I've ever seen came through the clouds over the basilica. It made the clouds glow while the rest of the sky was either a dark dark navy or black. It was pretty incredible.

The first day mom and I wandered around, going through tiny little alleyways just to see what we could stumble on to. Once we ended up on a wooden dock overlooking the grand canal. we could see the gondola drivers passing by and talking with one another. Venice was much less structured than the other places we went because we didn't know what we wanted to do. One day we went to Murano and watched someone blow a glass horse in less than five minutes, and also went to the glass museum (sort of cool, mostly boring). We kind of had our head in the clouds because it was the end of the trip and we were content to not have an agenda.

On our last full day we went into the Doge's palace. It was very ornate and impressive. It was interesting to hear how different the Venetian government was in comparison to Rome, and the role of the Doge. Mom thinks I'm going to come out of this trip as a historian.

We ate a lot of seafood in Venice, which was very nice. I tried one of their specialties, which is squid and pasta in a squid ink sauce. It was odd, but very good. I didn't think I would like it. I uploaded all my pictures into my photobucket account, which has a link on the side of this blog. It's kind of hard to put the actual pictures in the blog, so I've tried to label them the best that I can.

Since I have a midterm tomorrow I can't write about everything that happened recently, but I'll make bullet points so that I don't forget anything (and I'll expand later)
-San Castillo catacombs
-Capitolini museum
-Via Appia Antica
-Roma/Sampadoria game (torrential downpour)
-Chinese food (flooded metro)
-London
-crappy night transportation