Day 9: Venice to Florence

We woke up a few times in the middle of the night to stalk and kill the mosquitoes buzzing around our room. By morning, my bite count was 11, and Marc finally had 2. We had a little bit of trouble checking out of our hotel and were worried about the time, but we made it to the train with extra time to spare. Travel by train was so much easier than our plane flights. We didn't need to find transportation to the airport, go through security, or arrive several hours early. The train also had comfortable seats and outlets. It was a pleasant journey.

Upon arrival in Florence, we grabbed maps at the tourist station and tried to familiarize ourselves with the layout of the city and the path from the train station to our hotel. The entire city of Florence is very small, it never took us more than 10 minutes to walk anywhere. After a sweaty, suitcase-lugging trek to our hotel, we were greeted by working air conditioning and a private bathroom. It felt very luxurious.

We settled in, then went out to lunch. We found an adorable little restaurant down the block from our hotel and had our first Italian pizza and gnocchi. After lunch, we visited Santa Croce and the famous Florence leather market. One of the shops was giving a workshop to a group of American students instructing them on how to distinguish genuine leather from fake. A couple of blocks away from the leather market was Vivoli, arguably the best gelateria in the world. We had a mix of chocolate mousse and chocolate hazelnut, probably the most delicious and smoothest gelato we tasted while in Italy. We topped off our tour of Florence sights with visits to the Palazzo Vecchio, the Piazza della Signoria, Uffizi, and the Ponte Vecchio.

We had dinner reservations that evening at La Gisotra, a dimly lit romantic restaurant with strings of lights and many candles. The waitress brought us free flutes of champagne as soon as we sat down, and we also received a huge free appetizer sampler. The boar pasta and pear ravioli we ordered were wonderful. We ended our evening with a short stroll past the Baptistry, Campanille, Duomo, Piazza della Repubblica, and San Lorenzo.

Day 8: Venice

I woke up with a sore throat that morning, so after a breakfast that consisted mostly of tea with honey, I tried to speak as little as possible. Ariana woke up with 6 mosquito bites (because she didn't want to be left out of the fun of physical ailments). Clearly her blood is much sweeter than mine, because I was completely untouched.

Wandering around, we found a pharmacy, and we were greeted by a pharmacist who spoke English with only a slight accent. I figured that means he's fluent, so I started telling him what I wanted to buy - cough drops and vitamin C. This was too fast for the poor guy - he had me slow down and Ariana translated a couple words into Spanish (which is very close to Italian) to make sure he understood.

We spent most of the day walking the city - we walked through the Rialto shopping district and bridge over to Piazza San Marco. It was packed! Lines to get in everywhere were very long, and the restaurants were the most expensive in this already pricy city.

We saw the other main bridge over the Grand Canal - the Ponte dell' Academia - located near the university. Then we tried to go back to our hotel for a nap (since it was so hot!) but we ended up getting lost over on the far western side of Venice and had to stop into a cafe for directions. Another wander around our neighborhood and a pasta dinner closed our last night in Venice.

Day 7: Venice

Our first morning in Venice, we slept in a little later than we meant to. We woke up right as the free breakfast was closing. We quickly ran to the breakfast room across the hall and knocked on the closed door, hoping it wasn't too late. Luckily, the nice Italian woman let us in and made us delicious hot chocolate. She also gave us some bread and jams, which were delicious.

That morning we bought our train tickets for our future travels through Italy. They were expensive, but surprisingly easy to buy. It was nice that our hotel was right next to the train station, it made leaving Venice much less stressful than it otherwise could have been. After we got our train tickets out of the way, we set out to figure out how the rest of Venice's transportation worked. We bought vaporetto (water bus) tickets and headed over to the glass-making island of Murano.

Murano is famous for its gorgeous glasswork. Around the year 1300, all the glassmakers in Venice were exiled to Murano because their glass-blowing created a huge fire hazard on the mainland. Today, Murano is filled with little shops with lovely glass art. Upon arrival, we enjoyed a pasta lunch and quickly discovered that few places on the island accepted credit cards. Luckily, I exchanged my travelers cheques for cash before leaving Sevilla, so we were able to buy lunch and various gifts at Murano.

We accidentally hopped onto the wrong bus to get off Murano, but we still ended up near our hotel. We just ended up making many more stops and staying on the bus longer than we otherwise would have. Marc decided that waterbus was not the most fun or comfortable method of transportation.

That night for dinner, we had more delicious Italian food, and we also drank the most expensive Fantas we'd ever had (at 4 euros per glass). After dinner, we found a new favorite grocery store and bought a couple of delicious dessert items. We then wandered over in the direction of the Rialto Bridge. Venice was nice enough to provide us with many signs to follow, directing us pretty clearly. I took pictures of gondolas, and in turn, the passengers in the gondolas took pictures of me.

At the end of an alley, we made a turn and SURPRISE! We stumbled upon the Rialto Bridge. The bridge is huge, and during the day its filled with little touristy shops. At night, it's just filled with tourists taking pictures of the beautiful view. We included ourselves in the group and tried to capture some of the memorable sights of Venice.

Day 6: Paris to Venice

We had a nice leisurely morning wandering around Ile St. Louis and seeing the cute stores and restaurants. We went to Au Bon Marche, an amazing food market/spice market/clothing store/etc and picked up some nice chocolate and drooled over all the amazing food there. We wandered back to our hotel and had our last Nutella crepe and grabbed a panini for the airport.

After a long metro/shuttle/airport/shuttle/walk, we finally arrived late at our hotel in Venice. Everything in Venice is so expensive! Our one-star hotel was just as expensive as much nicer hotels in other cities, and there weren't many luxuries - shared bathroom down the hall, no AC (which is fine, except for the next part), no screens on the windows (which is unfortunate due to the monstrous Minnesota-like mosquitos).

Every restaurant in Italy has a few standard dishes. One of them, which quickly became my favorite, was the penne in a smoked salmon cream sauce. We also got gelato and decided that chocolate hazelnut was the best flavor in the world.