Masquerading In Venezia

Have you ever been to a party?

Don't answer that, because let me just tell you, you have never been to a party like Carnivale.

Before I tell you about our day at the world's largest block party, let me begin at the beginning Thursday night.

I finally got to go out dancing, which I've been waiting for since our first week, and it was fantastic. Bethany, Erika and I met the rest of our group at the six-girl apartment and walked to a disco with Lydia, Caitlin and Yelena. The place we originally wanted to go didn't open until 12:30 - a two hour wait - but the bouncer directed us to another club around the corner and we ended up hanging out there all night.

Our waiter let us into the VIP party upstairs where we got to dance and have a great time. It definitely made up for all the nights of not dancing (unless you count dancing in the living room to Italian music videos) and was a cool start to the weekend.

Friday we just hung out, but Saturday we got up bright and early to catch a bus to Venice from Santa Maria Novella Station at 9 a.m. Ten of us from Kent went though a tour group called Bus2Alps that seems to be a really excellent organization. We've booked a couple of trips with them and they've all been great so far.

"Four hundred and two of our closest friends" took the buses to Carnivale, according to our tour guide CJ. She was super helpful, answering all of our questions - even vague ones like "What should we do?" - and provided a very funny history of Venice and Carnivale as we started out on our trip.

Unfortunately, the bus ride was nearly three and a half hours. We went through a lot of the countryside and there were several feet of snow far from cities, which was interesting since there is no snow at all in the city.

We talked to Nik and Franco (who apparently transferred schools and is now living in Florence...) Friday night and they told us we wouldn't be able to get to Venice because of all the snow... Italians... They just don't know how to deal with a flurry. But there was a lot of slush on the highway, so I guess their concern was somewhat valid.

Anyhow, we watched "The Proposal" on the bus ride, so it wasn't too terrible and arrived in Venice around 2 p.m. Our first mission was to buy masks (I bought one in Firenze, so I didn't need to look, but a few of the other girls did), then catch a waterbus to the main island from Tronchetto Island where our bus parked.

Waterbuses are the way to go in Venice. They're literally the same as any other public bus system, but they travel the rivers. It's like a Pittsburgh Duck tour, but not as cool because it's a public transit system... It was still pretty novel though to stand holding onto a chair (it's like a New York subway - not enough seats for everyone) while we rode a bus through the rivers of Venice, stopping at floating bus stops to pick up costumed tourists and locals alike. (The locals, I noticed, all had much better costumes than any of the tourists. They really get into Carnivale.)

Our first stop after docking was to find lunch. We ended up at a little restaurant off the main streets run by a cute little old woman who was kind of the quintessential Italian grandma. I had carbonara again (it's so good) and Lydia and I split profiteroles for dessert. I was overexcited about this last part since, being a Harry Potter nerd, I've always wanted to try these. They were quite possibly the best dessert I've ever had, so it was well worth the wait and I got to feel like Ginny Weasley for a few minutes.

"Ginny! Ginny, I have saved profiteroles for you!"

After lunch, we all put our masks on and headed out to find the party. There were people everywhere in masks and many in full costumes. We made our way back to the main street and spent the next few hours looking in every store for masks and other souvenirs (partly because the stores were all cool, but mainly because they were warm and we were freezing). I bought a cute pair of spider earrings and got flower earrings thrown in for only a Euro extra.

As we finished our shopping, a large parade went by. It looked like Halloween on steroids. There were so many people in crazy costumes, pulling pedestrians off the sidewalk to join in the parade and stopping to pose for photos.

Once the parade was past us, we headed down to Piazza San Marco, Venice's main square to people watch some more, before moving away from the water to browse the shops and do some sightseeing.

At some point, it got too cold to keep walking, so we stopped in a bar to warm up with some wine. We ended up sitting next to an American woman and her English husband who flew in to Venice just for Carnivale. The woman was a little tipsy, but she was fun and told us all about how she fell in love with travel while studying abroad in Australia and Ireland during college. She met her husband while backpacking through Europe and they've been married and living in England for the past twelve years.

Once we were finally sufficiently warm and prepared to return to the streets, we said goodbye to our new friends and went back to browsing the shops until dinner.

We got dinner on another side street (margherita pizza for me), then went back to San Marco for a rumored DJ set.

The DJ set wasn't much. Some guy sang Old McDonald and no one seemed to know what to do. We hesitated there until the guy got off stage and they started playing filler music over the loudspeakers, including "Ai Se Eu Te Pego," which I swear must be the unofficial Italian national anthem. I'm pretty sure it's in Portuguese, too, and not even Italian. But you hear it everywhere and there's a dance that goes with it. So we sang along (because we have heard it that many times) and tried to copy how everyone else was dancing.

The music picked up after that and it was fun dancing in this giant mosh pit of people in the piazza. Eventually, it got to the point where we needed to start heading back to the waterbus that would take us to the island our bus was parked on.

As we were leaving, a be-caped man in a half-mask came up to us with a microphone and film crew. He was with a Russian news station and wanted us dancing in the background of his news report. We weren't in that much of a hurry, so we agreed and danced through the first take while his camera crew danced offscreen and gave us cues for when to wave, dance, shout, etc. The song ended though before he could get his shot, so we had to mill around for a while waiting for the next act to take the stage and the music to come on again. We waited long enough that we started getting worried about missing our waterbus.

Erika went to try to tell the news crew we were leaving, but they didn't speak enough English to understand her. Luckily for us, Yelena is Russian and was able to explain the situation to the reporter and his crew. But just as she was talking to the guys, the next group took the stage and the reporter was able to get his shot with us in the background.

Yelena said we'll be on the Monday news in Russia, so I guess we'll try to find it. We didn't have time to ask if the report would be online.

From there, we hurried back to the floating bus stop on the river to wait for the waterbus that would take us back to Tronchetto Island. Unfortunately, we got on the Number One line instead of the Number Two, so it took us an hour longer than it should have to get back to Tronchetto while we did a slow loop of Venice. We were able to call CJ from Bus2Alps and have them wait for us since we had joined other groups on the way to the bus and there were about forty Florence students stranded on the Number One.

The bus ride home was rough just because we didn't leave until about 11:15 at night, it was nearly a four hour trip and we were all exhausted. They played "The Tourist" on the way home, but I was too tired to pay much attention. Instead I talked Lauren, who sat next to me (our group got split up onto three different buses, so only four of us were on this one), listened to my iPod and attempted to sleep (with no luck).

Erika was on my bus, but Bethany had ended up on a different one. Our's had gone back to Venice about twenty minutes into the trip to pick up two girls who had gotten lost and been left behind, so we were the last one back to Florence. Despite how late it was and how full the day had been, Bethany and I sat up talking for a few hours after Erika and I got home and neither of us went to bed until after 4 a.m.

The only complaint I have about Carnivale was that I didn't see any bear-children. One of the pamphlets we got from Bus2Alps about Carnivale informed us that children dressed as bears would be swarming the streets, throwing confetti at us. I didn't see a single bear-child. In fact, the only kid I saw was dressed as a tiger and we didn't see him until the end of the day. Maybe bear-children are only active at night? Or maybe it was too cold for them? Either way, that was a letdown.

... Naturally, we slept in late today. I was the first in the apartment to wake up and I didn't get out of bad until about 11:00.

We spent most of the afternoon hanging out before Bethany and I went out with Kevin and Glenn. We first went to San Lorenzo market to do some shopping, but the cold weather and pushy shopkeepers drove us away after only about twenty minutes. We went instead to Piazza della Repubblica for the Chocolate Fair that has been going on since the beginning of the month.

Obviously, this was great. I mean, it was a chocolate fair. There was chocolate everywhere in every form and flavor imaginable. All four of us got chocolate-covered strawberries topped with sprinkles and a drizzle of melted white chocolate. They were one of the best things I've ever tasted.

Guns, handcuffs, tools, locks, trumpets, tapirs,
motorcycles... ALL made entirely of chocolate.

"Gucci" chocolate shoes.

Once we saw all the chocolate there was to see, we got groceries, then Bethany and I split from the guys and went to try dinner at The Clubhouse, an "American-style" ristorante in our neighborhood. We shared wings, a cheeseburger and fries, but I feel like Bethany and I might die in our sleep of food poisoning. 

The wings and fries were good, but the burger was raw. We contemplated for a while whether to eat the burger, but a few tentative bites proved that it did taste pretty good and we were afraid to send it back since the waitress didn't really speak English. We settled on eating it without looking at it or thinking about it so that we didn't freak out too much. 

All I could think of while eating was my impending death and the scene in "The Tenth Kingdom" where Wolf yells at the waitress for overcooking his steak.

"'Rare' implies dangerously cooked! When I say 'rare,' I mean
just let it look at the oven in terror, then bring it out to me!"

Right now Bethany and I both feel a little queasy, but we can't tell yet if we're dying from consuming raw hamburger, if we're just still really full or if we're psyching ourselves out. I guess we'll know in the morning... Wish us both luck.