Europe Trip: Day 17, June 6th

Darren and I left Massimo's place at around 11am, and made it to Venice by noon. We each ate a mini pizza and began our long day of walking over bridges, down small alleys, and along the water.

Venice is an interesting 'city' because there are probably more tourists than people who actually live there. So as we walked around you could hear English and German more often than you heard Italian! Despite the throngs of tourists it is surprisingly easy to lose your way and find a little dock or a spot along one of the canals with little to no people.

When we tried to go into the big church at San Marco, the guy at the door pointed at our backpacks and said we couldn't go in. Then he said something about how we have to 'put them around the corner', so Darren and I are like 'what the hell are you talking about, what corner?' We walked around and tried to see what he was talking about, but with no luck. Another two attempts at sneaking in with our backpacks also failed. So we gave up and decided to go and find this other big church with giant domes that was across the water. It didn't look that hard to find...

But distances in Venice can be deceiving. What looks like a straight shot will usually require backtracking halfway across the island to find a bridge, and then trying to find your way through the maze of streets that seem to have been placed at random. All you can do is try to head in a general direction and not get turned around. So finding that church became our quest, and it took a good hour or more to finally get there.

The inside of the church wasn't that impressive, but it was still satisfying to find it and I enjoyed the Byzantine influences -- plus it was free to go inside :) Then we took a break on the church steps for about an hour. By then we decided to start heading back to either find something to eat or to meet up with our host, Massimo.

Massimo had told us about this group of people who had created a boat out of garbage (more or less) and sailed it all the way from Slovenia to Venice. There was also a giant band with them that had couchsurfed with Massimo. In order to meet up with them on this small island we had to take a ferry, and Massimo had looked up the times and saw that 7:30pm was the last ferry that went all the way to our island. Unfortunately even though we started waiting at 7:10 or so, the #41 boat (like a bus number) didn't come until 7:55 and the person told us that they didn't go that far. They had skipped that entire time, and we were pretty much screwed.

After calling the band members they said we should take the #51 until it ends and then take this other transport, but they were really vague. Once we got there we had no idea where to go, we didn't even know the name of the transport. We asked one of the boat-taxi's how much it would cost and he said 50 euros, and Darren thought that was too much even split. So we wandered until we found a ferry to take us back. It was slow, hot, and extremely crowded, but an hour later we made it back to his car and drove home.

Despite the disappointment it was an exciting day, and we ended it with some good food and drinks at Michele's restaurant down the street from my host's house. We talked a bit with the owner, Michele, and it was nice to take it easy after walking for 8-9 hours straight. You'd think my feet would get used to the walking after 17 days, but apparently not, haha.

Next stop, Florence (Firenze).