Venice

We went to Venice last week. The city is comparable to a gigantic hedge maze: The canals and streets go every which direction, sometimes it's hard to find bridges across the canals, and all the while you are closed in by 4-5 floor stone buildings. As Justine put it, the place could have used a city planner. Nonetheless, we all absolutely loved it there. Our hostel was really strange, though. We arrived at a 16th century mansion with no locks on the doors, no lockers in the rooms, and no reception desk. It was a little shady, but the people staying there ended up being very nice. The next day the hostel manager took us to the beach on Lido, another island (we took the water taxi over there and we did it the "Italian way", meaning that we didnt buy tickets). He introduced us to some of his friends and soon we were invited back to Lido for an authentic home-cooked Italian dinner!

The next day we were awoken early by the hostel people, who lured us out of our rooms with breakfast at about a quarter till 8. As it turns out, they were having inspections that day and woke everyone up so that they could move bunk beds out of all the rooms... evidentally there are supposed to be only 5 per room, but they were cramming in 8-10 (shady hostel, right?). We decided to take a water taxi over to Murano, where they do all the glassblowing. We also decided not to look at the stop schedule as we were getting on, and spent an hour and a half standing on a boat because we got on in the wrong direction. Milano was great, though, and I could have spend hours and hours looking at all the incredible glass work. Stay tuned for updates on Cinque Terre, Rome, Athens, and Santorini (where we are going tomorrow!)