Venezia (Day Three)

So, on the train to Venice, I had set up a pretty good itinerary so that we could get everything done within two days. This included options such as going out to see the various islands, but that didn't actually happen because of the price of vaparetto tickets. The train strike obviously threw these plans off, so I woke up that morning not quite knowing what to do with the day. Winging it was always the best option so thats what we went with eventually. Anyway, we had to wake up early. Even though we were staying at the same place, we had to move rooms. Therefore, we had to get out of the current room by 10 to check out. We did exactly that and were told that we could get into the new room within the hour. Instead of straying too far away, we ended up grabbing a breakfast of fruits from the lovely fruit stands and hanging out by the canal in the Rialto Bridge area. We did that for an hour and then returned to get to our room.

The new room was huge. It had a king sized bed and two very comfortable-looking single beds. There was also a huge space that ended up being used to play Machiavelli. We did exactly that until we realized how much time we had wasted and went out for lunch. Ended up going to the Chinese restaurant again for lunch. We tried fried milk this time. Wanted to the night before, but chickened out.

We went on a search for the Internet after that, but only used it for a very short while because of how expensive it was. Once we got out of the Internet cafe, we could tell that a storm was about to hit once again and went back to the hotel. It rained about 15 minutes after we got back, but we still had pretty good timing. We watched people hide under the nearby fish market (since we had a better view of the canal and Venice in this new place) and then 3/4 of us ended up napping while the other one played his DS.

The storm was just about clearing up when I woke up, but it took forever for us to get Gianni to wake up. We eventually did and made our way out to find that restaurant from the day before (we had a very simply and relaxing day that day). It was a lot easier to find it this time around. It ended up being this American-themed pizzeria, with a duck motif. They had little placemats with a duck dressed up with Batman/Superman/Spiderman, etc. The pizza was pretty good. Gianni got this "American" pizza, that was pretty much cheese pizza topped with fries.

I planned this dinner excursion out well. The restaurant was halfway between the hotel and the train station, so we went to the train station immediately after. The strike was just finishing, but everything was closed, so we were unable to get tickets for Florence for the next day. This caused me to stress since I could clearly see a packed train station of unhappy travelers and people who were all getting reservations on the self service machines that we could not use with our Eurail passes. Decided that the best option would be to wake up very early and get tickets as soon as the ticket window opened. It was a little after 9 at this point, so we just went back to the hostel and I made everyone get ready for bed and go to bed early.