Today’s goal was to get to Venice.
I woke up around 6 and we were catching a 6:48 bus. I ate breakfast and started cleaning the kitchen up. I had to get all the trash out. Clean the tables and counters. Throw away all the food and wash any remaining dirty dishes and dry them and put them away. I had to find the food to save and package it up for travel. Well that took a long time and it was 6:43 before I knew it. We ran out the door and my shoes were untied and my bags were flying and we were hurrying to the bus but of course we missed it. So we started walking to the station. There was a bus that came later that would’ve dropped us off 2 minutes before our train and there was also a train 30 minutes later so I wasn’t worried but the group took off before discussing our options so we walked an hour to the train station and missed the 7:30 train so we took the 8:05 train. We waited for it and then changed over to a different train about 20 minutes later and then a different one about 30 minutes later. There were two German hikers next to us and two Chinese people who were talking in English to each other. It was kind of cool how they both had their own language and then a mutual language. Anyway they were kind of loud but the Germans asked the Asians if they were from India and that cracked me up. They said no no China China while pointing to their faces and skin color lol.
We waited for 30 minutes and then got on a train for 5 hours. Reservations were compulsory for this one but we were winging it. When we got on, there literally were no seats so we sat in the stairs. This worked pretty well for awhile but when the conductor came around, he informed us this was a reservation only train. Information that would’ve been helpful to know but there is no place to know what trains are mandatory to reserve and which aren’t. We had to pay for a reservation or get off so we paid even though there were no seats so it was a waste of money. At Milan most of he people got off so we looked for free seats and I found one. A lot of people got on though after awhile and most seats were taken again so I was lucky to find one. When we arrived in Venice, we walked out of the train station and immediately saw the canal. Boats all over and green water. The green wasn’t pretty this time though. It was like a mucky dirty green and I hate to thing about all the gross things in that water. We walked down the sidewalk and ran into the xi chi group! How funny. We talked to them for a bit and they went on a gondola ride which is cool and grant took a tumble into the canal. Oops. The stairs are pretty slippery so don’t mess around on them or you might just get wet;) we started walking to our hostel and went through many winding streets and over a lot of bridges. The buildings literally just shoot up from the canals. They have to deal with flooding a lot here. That’d be annoying. The buildings are really neat because they all look so old. The brick and plaster and painting and roofing and windows. They all just look like they’ve been around for a very long time. Even though it’s been invaded by souvenir shops, it still holds its historical feel. And the shops here seem a bit classier than other places we’ve been. They sell a lot of murano glass, masks, leather bags, and classic Italian souvenirs. We finally found our hostel and dropped our bags off. It was a room with seven beds so we were sharing it with a random girl again. she wasn’t there so we left our stuff and went out to get lost in Venice. We looked around for a cheap dinner and to shop. We grabbed some burgers and continued on. We decided to save pizza and pasta for later. We went into many little shops and walked toward the bridge with shops in it. We ran into xi chi people again and grant told us about his slippery splash. We walked by a lot more shops and walked through the streets. We didn’t really have a goal. We didn’t really know where we were going either. We eventually made our way back to our hostel. It was pretty early but we were exhausted and things were closing down. We also ran into a protest so we were kind of ready to take showers and go to sleep. I think I was asleep before 10. The random lady came back while we were getting ready for bed. She got in bed and she seemed pretty tired too. We were going to wake up earlier to explore Venice in the morning before our train so we didn’t feel too bad about going to sleep early.

Fun facts. Venezia is Venice in Italian. Venice is like literally just little pieces of land submerged in water. It looks so weird on the map. It was very cloudy all day, no blue skies or sun. It matched my mood because I was pretty gloomy about leaving the alps. I miss the mountains. It’s not smart to go from mountains to cities haha. You kind of lose the excitement for being in Italy. But the excitement will come soon I’m sure.

Shoutout. Rhyan for being cool and going on an adventure to Hollywood!! You and Daniel are neat. Thanks for sharing your adventure!