Venice

I took the 3 hour train ride to Budapest on Friday morning to meet up with all the exchange students who were going to Venice. At about 8am, we all boarded the bus and drove the 12 hours to Italy. On the way, we stopped at a view point that overlooked Lake Balaton, sometimes referred to as the "Hungarian Sea" or, by non hungarians, "Europe's biggest puddle". Lake Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe, but it is very shallow with a mean depth of 3.2 m. After our brief visit to Lake Balaton, we boarded the bus again and slept, very uncomfortably, on the bus until we finally arrived in Venice around 8am.

Once in Venice we were left to our own devices. Unfortunately, I ended up with a group of girls who just wanted to shop while they were in Venice. After a while I got sick of waiting outside shop after shop that sold the same thing so I ditched my friends and explored the city on my own. I was disappointed with how tourist oriented Venice was, but once I finally escaped the line-up into Louis Vittons and the endless stores full of pointless crap, I was not suprised to find that Venice is indeed very beautiful. I spent my day walking through the winding streets taking pictures, stumbling into random museums and galleries, and people watching. There is a very interesting mix of people in Venice. The native Venetians were dressed to the nines and paid no attention to the tourists. Then there were, of course, loads of camera wielding tourists who were willing to pay way too much for things that they didn't need, and then there were the honeymooners and rich travelers who had come to Venice to shop and to indulge in luxurious things that apparently only Venice can offer. Because there is a constant supply of people willing to spend money, it was very difficult for those of us who didn't have endless amounts of money to find anything affordable to eat or buy. I was lucky enough to find a cool place that, for a reasonable price, sold bread slices with various cheeses and tapinades and I ate my lunch there. Unfortunately, I was not so lucky when I went in search of a cup of coffee. When I thought that I had finally found an affordable place to buy coffee, the waiter told me that there would be an extra 5 Euro added onto my bill to pay for the "music costs" (a.k.a. the lone violin player on the main floor of the restaurant).

While I thoroughly enjoyed taking in the sights of Venice, I cannot imagine spending more than one day there. Venice is insanely gorgeous, but I found the city to be somewhat unwelcoming and claustrophobic.

Some of my trip highlights include a visit to the Gallery of Modern Art, stumbling into an uknown museum and looking at some really cool "pushing the boundaries" kind of art, riding in a gondola with a bunch of my friends and hearing all about the city's history from the gondaleer, feeding the pigeons in Piazza San Marco, and getting lost and trying, unsuccessfully, to find where I was on a map.

Here are a few pictures from my trip:

Feeding the pigeons in Piazza San Marco, and gondolas on the Grande Canale.

Me and the gondaleer (and his hat).