Venezia

On Friday, Rita and I set out for the train station in San Bonafacio, and arrived in time to find out the train for Venezia would be arriving soon. The guy selling the biglietti basically lied and told us it was the intercity, so we paid more money to take the direct train. As it turned out, it was il treno regionale, so we stopped at every little station along the way, and it took us two hours to get to Venezia. However, when we got there, I was so excited, I couldn't believe I was finally in Venice with the sun shining! (When we lived in Italy, my family went during the winter, when I went back to Italy two years ago with my friend Pete, we were there for Carnivale at the end of February, but it was gray and raining the whole time.) And then...oh for shame, and then I had to stop and buy a memory card at three times what it should cost, because when I went to erase old pictures on the train to make room for the new, I realized I'd brought my camera without a memory card in it- DOH! Some highlights in Venice included the Ponte Rialto (which a lot of people think is the Bridge of Sighs), the Ponte Sospiri (which actually is the Bridge of Sighs, so romanticized by Lord Byron because it connected the Palazzo Ducale to the prison, and prisoners who were to be executed or serve a life term would heave great sighs or take their last breaths of freedom as they crossed this bridge), Basilica di San Marco, and the traffic on the canals.

I had two servings of gelato in my favorite flavor, pistacchio (pronounced peestakkio in Italian with a hard c), and took a picture so as not to forget the sight of gloriously mounded, creamy, melt in your mouth, oh so much better than ice cream, small bowl or cone of heaven.

And I was reaquainted with one of my favorite Italian phrases..."sempre dritto." At the end of our day, as Rita and I tried to find our way through the maze of small, windy Venetian streets back to the train station, we got lost. We stopped several times to ask for help, and the inevitable answer was a right and then a left (or a left and then a right) and from there on "sempre dritto" although you need to imagine the first syllable of the first word drawn out in what you might almost call an Italian drawl. Seeeeeeemmmmmmpre dritto. Meaning, always straight. If you ask an Italian anywhere for directions, his answer will always include at some point, and often more than once, that you have to go sempre dritto. I even remember hearing about this in our crash Italian course before my family moved there for two years. The funny part being, you can't sempre dritto in Venezia. There are no cars, so the streets are tiny and twisty, and intersect and interconnect in impossible ways. You could only sempre dritto if you were a crow. But eventually, we did find the train station. And discovered it was three hours until the train we needed, and once we were finally on that train, Rita had my heart stopped for a minute as we pulled out from the station, the conductor made an announcement, and Rita told me we'd gotten onto the wrong train. I didn't see how that was possible, and it turned out we were on the right one. But traveling with Jenn's mom, as I was just beginning to discover, is always an adventure.

I will leave the rest for tomorrow, as there is so much to write about, but for now, here are a few more pictures from Venezia. Ciao tutti!