Venezia!!!!

Well, we said danke and alvidazen (sp?) to Switzerland, and bonjorno to Venezia!!!! Now…when we first got into town, I couldn’t help but think…”dang these buildings are hecka old!” Duh!!! LOL. We got off the train and boy did it stink. I guess that’s what you get when you’re surrounded by “stagnant” water. But…it was somewhat nostalgic walking down the streets of this old town. We went there with no reservations of any kind. Our goal…walk around and compare prices and find the cheapest hotel/hostel. That was quite the adventure. We walked for a couple blocks, and over only one bridge before we found “Archie’s Rooms,” a quaint little hostel nestled in center of town for only 57 euro a night for the three of us. This was a steal compared to the 75-120 euro/nt at the other places.

I know what you’re thinking…hostel = ghetto. But really…we just needed a bed and a place to leave our bags. Some of the perks included:

- HUGE room with 5 beds. We only shared the room with one other girl who was hardly ever there.
- Free Wifi!!!! This was by far my favorite. I was able to do all my camping on facebook, and upload a bunch of pictures. Not to mention update my blog after what felt like forever (when in actuality it was only like 4 or 5 days). LOL. There were also two computers in the common area available.
- Free lockers to store all our valuables.
- Access to a plethora of kitchen appliances (microwave, kettle, stove, etc.) to cook our food that we brought. Not to mention our own drawer in the fridge.
- No curfew.

The only drawback…no hot showers. If you wanted hot water you had to pay 1 euro for 8 minutes. So…we roughed it out and took ice cold showers the two nights we were there. It wasn’t so bad once your body turned numb from the cold. LOL. We decided this was probably the best thing to do for the next two countries considering many of these cheaper places may not be listed online. Ahhhh..the life of a backpacker.

Now…onto the city. Honestly, my favorite part of our whole time there was walking around San Marco’s square and along the Grand Canal. After a while all the other streets start to look the same. We realized this when we got lost the first night. Considering we were tightening up on our budget, we decided not to go to any of the nearby islands. Which was probably best considering we pretty much saw enough of what would be found there in Venice itself. Gelatto was the best!!!! Ahhhh….and so was the pizza! We decided to save the pasta for Rome. There are so many little ristorante’s and pizzeria’s it was madness trying to choose one. Mmmm..thinking about it makes me hungry. All in all it was a great adventure…but I’m ready to move on. Being surrounded by all that water made me yearn for the beaches in Hawaii. That was probably the worst…being hot and not being able to jump in the water to cool off. So Rome is our next stop…and then GREECE!!!!! I don’t even care what we see in Greece, I just want to jump in that deep blue water!!!!