Venezia: Take Two

It's amazing how different Venice is in the spring when it's warm and sunny compared to Venice during Carnivale when it's far below freezing.

As much as I loved Carnivale, I was so excited to have the chance to return to Venice for a full weekend and actually explore the islands, rather than just going from store to bar to restaurant to store in a futile attempt to avoid hypothermia. Also, I was super excited to spend the weekend with our whole CCI group again. This was the first weekend since Rome in January (I'm not counting Milan because that was a day trip) where all fifteen of us (plus our three honorary CCI-mates) spent the weekend together. It was much better than Rome in that respect because we now know each other, rather than in Rome where we were still in that awkward "I just met you" phase.

Anyhow, we met Petra and her boyfriend at the train station at 8:00 Friday morning and arrived in Venice around 10:30. From there, we took a half hour ferry ride to the main island to check into our hostel, Don Orione Artigianelli. The hostel actually turned out to be a religious guest house and cultural center, which I thought was an odd place to put up fifty college students, but so it goes.

It was a nice place, and I stayed in a decently sized room with Bethany, Erika, and Yelena. We had just enough time here to put our things in storage (our room wasn't ready) grab sandwiches at a cafe down the street, then regroup with Petra for a tour of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, just a short walk from Don Orione.

The museum was very cool. We split into two groups here, and my group had a wonderful tour guide. She was a theatre major from Puerto Rico, and she was very enthusiastic, which made the tour all the more entertaining. We got to see all kinds of modern art, which was refreshing after looking at Renaissance art every week. Although I really don't understand modern art at all. I also didn't recognize the names of most of the artists, besides Jackson Pollack. We saw the Pollack collection and, even though our guide explained him to us, I still don't see why he's so famous... But other than that, I enjoyed the paintings we saw and liked the explanations our guide gave of them, even if I couldn't always see what she told us we were supposed to see. (For example, one painting is a series of blocks in various shades of gray pieced together like the game Railroad Rushhour... and it's supposed to show a couple swing-dancing.)

After the museum, we had a free afternoon to do whatever we wanted. Most of us went back to Don Orione to check into our rooms and nap. After nap time, my room set off with Lydia, Caitlin, Jess, and Kate to explore. Before long, we ran into a gondolier who talked most of our group into riding a gondola. Kate and I were the only two to opt out since it was €30 per person for a twenty minute ride. It would be €50 per for music and a "guided tour."

While the other girls went on the ride, Kate and I looked for ghosts. Venice is apparently one of the most haunted places in the world. Erika told us this when we went in February, since she hunts ghosts in her free time (she has all kinds of freaky audio and videos on her computer from nights she's spent camping out in old prisons and asylums... it's creepy stuff). Kate and I, of course didn't find any ghosts, maybe since it was late afternoon and we didn't have our Ghostbusters gear. Instead, we checked out some stores and just enjoyed the nice day.

We met everyone back at the guest house shortly before group dinner at Taverna San Trovaso. This dinner was organized by the school, so we had several courses of traditional Venetian food and it was all delicious. We got bread, raw salmon antipasto, a seafood plate (fish, squid, and prawns), and tiramisu. It was so filling and we were all so tired from getting up early and walking around all day that my room went back to the guest house after dinner ended around 11:00. However, it had rained while we were in the restaurant, and we went outside to find the streets flooded where the canal rose over its edge. It was a very wet walk home and my socks and shoes got soaked.

Saturday, we got to sleep in a little bit, and didn't meet Petra and Rocky until 10:30, after breakfast. Our first stop was at the Church of the Frari, where we learned about the architecture and talked about the artwork inside. We followed that with a tour of San Marco (the main square where they had the giant block party during Carnivale). Once again, the area outside the Basilica of San Marco was flooded, so we had to walk across a dock they put up between a dry area of the piazza and the front door. Once again, we talked about frescoes, sculptures, and architecture.

We ended the tour with a walk across the Rialto Bridge, a Venetian icon, and saw a mask shop where they made the mask and some costumes from the movie Eyes Wide Shut, saw the manhole Daniel Craig climbs out of as James Bond in Casino Royal, and saw one of Woody Allen's houses.

Rialto Bridge, the first bridge in Venice.

Following our tour, we had free time again. Lydia and I explored around San Marco for a little while and visited the Bridge of Sighs, where condemned prisoners used to cross from the prison to the main square where they were publicly executed. Rocky said that this was a huge event back in the day before it went out of practice, and that people would come to the harbor from all areas of Venice to watch the executions from their boats.

Eventually we met up with Bethany, Yelena, Caitlin, Danielle, and Kristy, and the group of us sat around in a nice park by the Grand Canal for a while, then stopped for traditional Venetian spritzers on the way back to Don Orione.

We had a late CCI family dinner at Ristorante San Trovaso, where I got delicious seafood pasta and Lydia and I split profiteroles for dessert. It was dark once we finished with dinner, so it was time to ghost hunt.

Sort of. We wandered around for a bit, but since we couldn't find any ghosts, Lydia decided we would make our own. This turned out to be so much fun that we spent several hours creating ghosts in the neighborhoods near our guest house and along the canal. We got a lot of strange looks from locals and passing tourists since we were dancing to Lauren's iPod in between shots. And this is an example of the end results.

Lauren with ghosts.

Kate with ghosts.

Me as a ghost with Kate and Lauren.

Kate killing Glenn.

So yeah... That's that evening.

Yesterday was another early morning at the Scuola di San Rocco with Rocky, where we learned about flagellation and how it was outlawed in Venice during the Renaissance. We then went to the Gallerie dell'Accademia museum to see paintings by Tintoretto, Vasari, and Leonardo da Vinci (Vitruvian Man), among others. While we were looking at one exhibit, a man came up to Rocky and began asking him in Italian about a sign he noticed painted into one of the paintings in the exhibit. Of course, you could tell Rocky was loving the attention since he knows everything there is to know about everything involving art, and the man went away looking impressed, giving us all a thumbs up when he left. Good old Rocky, even schooling the Italians.

The one thing Rocky couldn't tell us when Erika asked him about it after the tour, was how to get to the island of Poveglia, rated the most haunted place in the world. We had asked several local Venetians about the island prior to this point, but they had all either ignored the question or told us not to ask about it. One woman even crossed herself when we asked her and walked away. The place is so haunted because, at the time of the Black Death in Europe, Venetians who caught the plague were exiled there to die in a plague colony alone on the island. Most of them starved to death or died of the elements before the plague had enough time to run its fatal course. Anyone even suspected of having the plague was sent there no questions asked. Eventually, the Venetians even began shipping prisoners there to die among the plague victims. Rumor has it you can hear the screams of the victims any time you get near the island, and the concierge at the guest house confirmed that he was familiar with this story. So Erika was all about Poveglia, of course, and we were all very curious as well, but alas, the only way to even get near the island is to take your own boat, or talk a local into giving you a ride.

When Erika asked, Rocky acknowledged that he knew a little bit about Poveglia's story, but didn't have any information to add to what we already knew. Sad day. At least we saw "ghosts" Saturday night.

...

The Accademia took up most of the morning. We had free time after that, but it was pouring, so we went back to the guest house to pack, then we sat outside in the courtyard under the awning and played Uno and charades for two hours until it was time to leave.

So it was a great weekend. Venice is by far one of the greatest places I've ever been, despite Rocky's complaints that it's nearly impossible to get around on foot (you're meant to see it from the water after all). It also amazes me that Venice even exists. There are no natural water or food sources and it's build entirely on mud (every tower in Venice leans - take that Pisa - as well as many of the buildings, and the floors of the oldest buildings are all warped due to constant flooding).

But it's so gorgeous and very cool... and thankfully this time around it wasn't nearly so cold.

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.