Yesterday was a “free day,” but there was a recommendation that
we go see Venice today. Since we would not actually be going to Venice as a
group, and you don’t see waterways and canals like Venice anywhere else, I
definitely wanted to go. The weather forecast was kind of ominous for the day
and it did hold true for the entire time we were there. We left in the morning
on a 3 hour “fast train” train ride to Venice from Milan. I was a little tired,
so I just listened to an audiobook and rested by head. When we finally had
arrived, unfortunately like the forecast of 100% chance of rain, it was
raining. It was still a cool experience to see the city of Venice and I would
have kicked myself for missing it since I am already here in Italy. First, we
wanted to start out by going to St. Mark’s
Square, so we got on one of the public transportation water ferries and headed
around to the other side of the island. It was kind of fun to get to see a lot
of Venice from the water ferry, since that is the major method of
transportation there.
Once we finally arrived at St. Mark’s Square, we found
somewhere to eat and had lunch. A lot of the experiences that I have had with
service here in restaurants make me really enjoy eating at them in the US more.
Since here they just have a “service fee” there is no need for tipping and the
place we ate at also included a “cover fee.” These would be all fine and dandy
if the waiters actually gave a crap and provided decent service, but here they
are all just pretty lazy and some of them like at this restaurant are jerks. We
were finished for about 10 minutes before we even see him to ask him for the
check and then he doesn’t even acknowledge that I asked him for it, he just
keeps on walking. He is setting up tables right down about two rows from us and
then I ask him again and he gets irritated apparently and says that he will
bring it to me in a few minutes… and then continues on setting up tables right
next to us, even though the restaurant is far from busy. Then finally after finishing
up setting all the tables, he proceeds to get us the check. That was one of my
most expensive meals because of the cover fee and service and it included okay
food and awful service. I am usually more generous with my tips than most of
the service fee, so I would prefer to tip instead, but since they seem entitled
to the service fee, they don’t provide good service. I will not miss this part
of Italy.
Anyways after we were done there, we head out into the rain
again to go actually take a look around the square and go get some gelato. It
was pretty neat, and I could only speculate as to how crowded it would be if it
wasn’t raining. Then we got in line to go into the actual St. Mark’s Cathedral.
It was a pretty neat cathedral that was covered in a lot of gold colored tiles
to make a lot of mosaics on the inside and outside. They didn’t let you go too many
places in there without paying so we didn’t spend too long in there. After we
looked around the square a little more, we headed for the Rialto Bridge to get
some pictures of it and head back towards the train station. After we had
finished getting pictures there, we started wandering around in the general
direction we needed to go to get back to the train station. After a while of
wandering around and ending up in dead ends and small alleyways, we decided to actually
use the map, and then we at first couldn’t find out where we were, so we walked
around a little more until we figured out exactly where we were and then it was
a breeze to get back there.
We ended up by this really cool bridge that I saw
when we first got on the water ferry, so we went over and I got some closer
pictures to get a good look at it. It was a really interesting design, and yes,
I am an engineer, so I thought the bridge was really cool. Haha!
Then we got our train tickets back to Milan, this time on
the “slow train” which would take about four hours. We were looking for some
seats all together when we spotted some of our other group members on the same
train that we were going to take, so we grabbed some seats near them. I
listened to my audiobook some more and was apparently pretty tired, because I
fell asleep in the middle of it and woke up to see that the people sitting
across from us had gotten off the train. That was kind of weird to wake up to
there being nobody in those seats, because it just seemed like a few minutes
ago that they were there. Then I was able to enjoy the countryside scenery the
rest of the way back. They have quite a bit of agriculture in this region, so I
saw corn fields, vineyards, wheat, and other things that I am not totally sure
what they were. Then after the long train trip, we finally ended up back at the
station in Milan. We stopped to get some food in the station and then headed
back towards the hostel via the subway. We got off at the same stop as we had
before, but somehow we ended up coming out at a different location than before,
so we just guessed where we needed to go and walked around for a while until we
asked a woman for directions to the major street we needed to get to. She was
able to point us off in the general direction and we hadn’t done too badly in
guessing where we needed to go. Then we found it and went back to the hostel. I
spent the rest of the evening resting and catching up on journaling for the
trip and catching back up with the world. Then I went to bed knowing that
tomorrow was the last time I would get a chance to sleep in since we had half a
“free day” tomorrow.
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