Venezia

Ahhh, bella Venezia!!



I took an early morning flight from Catania to Venice on the 14th of October. You would be amazed how many people are at the airport at 6 AM. I also find their system of organized chaos intriguing. They don’t really line up in Italy, it’s more like get as close as you can to the corral and maybe you will get in. If you don’t cut in front of someone then someone will cut in front of you. You also don’t enter the plane from the terminal, you have to take a shuttle out to the plane.

So I arrived at the Venice airport which looked like a luxury hotel compared to Catania’s. Unfortunately I left all my information about the weekend at home so I had to try to remember which bus to take to reach the meeting point for all the other Aiesecers. This was a planned weekend for anyone interested in seeing the sites of Venice, organized by the Aiesec LC in Venezia. After about an hour and a half of being on the wrong buses I finally met up with everyone. Well at least I thought it was everyone. Apparently others were coming in a bit later than the scheduled 11am meeting time. So we checked into our hostel just outside of Venice, dropped off our things and headed into the city.



We walked around the city all day, it was beautiful. I can’t imagine trying to navigate the streets by myself though. The “streets” are tiny winding alleys that barely 2 people can fit through, then they open up into a piazza here and there. I loved all the canals and the gondolas. I heard that to take a gondola ride it would set you back 70 Euros. Yikes! I also heard that they don’t do singing anymore because the neighbors complained about it, but later in the night I did hear one.

We ended up at St. Mark’s Square. It was gorgeous, there were tons of people and tons of pigeons there. People would feed the pigeons and let them crawl all over them. Gross! My friend Nema (from Canada) was sitting on some steps and got pooped on. It was awesome, we took pictures. We went inside the Basilica and up into the Tower where you could take incredible panoramas of the city.



Later that night we went to dinner at a place called Ae Oche. I turned to my friend Dhiren and said Ae Oche? And he replied, yes I’m fine, are you OK? Dinner was great, I had lasagna and some chicken and veggies, accompanied by some white wine. I slept like a baby that night.

The next day we headed out to Treviso, a small community outside of Venice. There was a wine festival that day. I ‘sampled’ ( I use the quotes because they filled your glass) many different local wines. All were awesome. Unfortunately I lost the paper that had all the names of the wineries. At the end of the day it’s not the wine that is important to remember, it’s who you shared the day with, who you danced with in the streets, who you met, and who you bonded with that matters.