Does it rain here frequently?

Venice…came and went too quickly. Wer’e about to get on a plane for Budapest but a quick recap of the last couple of days.

First, just wanted to give you all an idea of what our train time looks like. We wrote down a few things from our Florence to Venice train we found rather amusing…
1.Note to self: please do not title a Christian song “All I need.” We discovered that Noelle’s ipod had 7 songs titled this and they were all by Christian artists. Seriously now.
2.If you play me puff the magic dragon I will cry…guaranteed.
3.Muffins from the train station that appear to be scrumptious and chocolately taste like cardboard and are hard as a rock. We ate it nonetheless.
4.If Noelle wants you to like a particular song, she will do all in her willpower to make this happen. As I started to hand her back her earphone (I wasn’t a fan of the music choice) she looked at me and eagerly asked if I at least wanted her to fastforward to the bridge. No Noelle, that’s okay.
5.Our new found obsession…fig fruit from Manfredi’s tree. He packed us up 7 figs for the train ride…we ate them all. Side note, figs are amazing and we cant find them anywhere else. What the heck?
6.After I introduced Noelle to the actual ipod identification game included with every ipod, her pride quickly began to swell as she guessed every song correctly and scored over 10000 points.
Basically, we listen to a lot of music and amuse ourselves with anything we can. We do love the trains though.

Okay back to Venice. Venice is incredible and it’s like a dream city you never really think is real or logical to exist. As most of you probably know, it’s an island but not what you imagine. None of the buildings are really on land, they are all just on water and the entire island is full of canals, bridges, and water transportation. No cars! It’s probably the best city to just wander around and get lost in -which was good for us considering that’s what we end up doing in every city we visit.

From everything we heard about Venice, the top 2 most popular warnings were: it’s really hot there and there is no air movement. Okay, so it was the windiest city we’ve been to—at least in italy—and there was a rainy day which actually made the city chilly. I think this went in our favor considering how everyone said it was dreadfully hot. To avoid the rain, we snuck into a cheap and wonderfully delicious pizza parlor small enough to only hold 4 people. In an honest effort to make conversation with the pizza guy who spoke not one lick of English, Noelle asked him if the rain was normal. Her first wording was “does it rain here a lot?” and after a blank stare she reworded here question to “does it rain here frequently?” oh of course if this man didn’t understand the first question he surely wasn’t going to get the second. I had to give Noelle a minor lecture on her avoidance of using large words with those who don’t even understand the small ones. She is not allowed to use words over four letters big now. No more “frequently’s”.

We met some wonderful Canadian girls here in Venice who we ended up spending most of our time with. They are a little younger than us and doing the same Europe trip. We loved them. It’s so fun to instantly connect with people who you can naturally be yourself around. I mean they actually got to see the real Kristen…most of you reading that are close friends are probably laughing right now because you know they had quite some entertainment with that. Today we got up really early and took a train to Bolzano, which is a small village in the Dolomites, essentially the Italian alps. Wasn’t much to do there but stare at all the beauty and hike around. We paid a visit to “the earth pyramids” which were pretty interesting. I can’t tell you how they got there because all the descriptions were in German…boo. I like to think they literally erupted out of the earth considering they look exactly like stalagmites. But then again, I don’t even know how stalagmites are formed so what do I know. In our attempt to find a new path to take, we actually began to hike down the mountain until we realized it was an outrageously long hike (we took a gondola to the top) so what do we do instead? Hitch a ride with a little old Italian man who spoke no English either. He let us hop in his car and we cruised down the mountain. He asked us lots of questions, which disappointingly enough we failed to understand and stared at him blankly. But we got down the mountain so success!

Once again, our luck with transportation evidenced itself again. One. We got on the wrong train going home. It was headed to Venice but it took twice as long because it made twice as many stops. Whoops. Two. I forgot my eurail pass today…not a good day to forget it considering we ended up taking four lengthy trains all day long to get from Bolzano and back. We did come up with a brilliant plan that involved intense lookouts for the pass checker and a quick run to my hideout (the bathroom) to avoid getting a fee at all costs. To our advantage, we didn’t have to use this risky ploy. Our passes were never checked and I paid no fines!

Tonight is probably going to be our last night in a hostel for the rest of the trip…more couch surfing baby! It’s so sad that we’re leaving Italy considering we’ve been here two weeks and covered just about every region. Really grown to love this place but we’re pumped to meet up with Kathleen tomorrow. Yay.

Until Budapest…ciao ciao!