My trip to Venice probably wasn't as eventful as my train ride to Venice.
I left Budapest on Friday night, and caught my train to Venice. Everything went ok until I got the the border of Croatia. They're pretty intense about border patrol apparently. First two guys came through the train and took off all the ceiling panals to make sure people weren't smuggling through in the ceiling. Then 3 people came through to look at my passport, followed by someone asking if I had anything to declare. So I go to sleep again and then the same thing happens when we get to the Slovenian border, except this time they don't believe my passport is real. The guy was yelling at me in Slovenian, and then finally managed to ask me in English "Tourist?", I said yes, and he gave me a look like, "yah, right." and then whipped out one of those jewler's magnifying things. He inspected my passport with it, and then kept asking me over and over, "what did you do to your passport?" Finally he was told to move along by the person asking if we had anything to declare. He gave me back my passport, and I inspected it. Sure enough, there are a couple dots of what look like ink (possibly from someone stamping it?) on the front.
So I think that everything's fine now that I'm in Italy. I go to sleep and wake up looking out into solid blue. Turns out we're right next to the coast, and the blue is fog. Every once in awhile the trees break up and I can see the coast. So that's all nice, untill I realize that we're heading the wrong direction. I try to figure out if maybe I'm just turned around, but we're definately head east when we should be going west. So we backtrack for awhile, and I worry a little bit, but we finally get to a train station, sit for a bit, and then head the right way. At 7:30 we pull into a train station, right on time, except for it's not Santa Lucia station, which means we're not in Venice. Ok, so we're running a little late. 2 hours later we're still not there, and I am really worried that I missed my stop or I didn't realize I was supposed to switch trains. I did finally get to Venice, but it turns out the train was 2 1/2 hours late. And no one felt it would be necessary to make an announcement about that. Not that I would have understood it anyway.
I finally make it to Venice. I love Venice!! It's amazing. It doesn't seem like a city that people actually live in, just because it's so different. All the streets are so small, and medieval, and the fact that there are no cars. None. Hardley any trees either.
I wandered around the city all day. I basically vetoed the idea of museums. It's easy to get lost in Venice, and that's basically what I did all day was get lost. A compass would have done me more good than a map. But it was such a beautiful city, it was great to get to walk around the streets, even if I didn't know where I was half the time.
It started to rain halfway through the day, so I took off my socks and sweater so that I would have some dry clothes for the ride home.
At St. Mark's Square I got some coffee. I don't know what I got, it kinda sounded like a Macchiato. It was amazingly good though. For coffee, pizza, and other little things you order and then eat at the bar, or a tall table made for standing. If you sit down (not that there's many places for you to sit) it doubles the price.
Around 4 I finally had to sit down, so I found a mostly sit-down cafe and had tortellini. It was wonderful! I was really happy to find out that pasta in Italy is better. It would have been pretty sad if it wasn't.
I spent the next couple of hours wandering around the stores in Venice. After it got dark I was exhausted. There are signs everywhere in Venice about not sitting anyway expect where it explictitly says to sit, but all the benches were soaked from the rain. So I found a niche in a church that used to hold a statue, and sat in there to listen to my ipod and people watch untill it was time to go. By that time, I had folded over the back of my shoes because my feet were bleeding, my jeans were rolled up but still soaked to the knees, I had aquired a grocery bag that was holding most of my belongings, and I was too tired to even smile. Even so, I was sad to leave Venice.