Oh The Places We’ll Go

We made it to Milan safely and easily after a boring and uneventful stay in Venice.  Now, let me just preface by saying, Venice isn’t all bad.  I’m sure if you stayed in the city center with someone you loved it’d be an absolute dream.  However, staying in a dump listening to romantic music in the blistering hot with your brother… doesn’t exactly sound appealing.

Our stay here in Milan has been alright.  Once again, everything is closed because of the holiday and nothing is open again until the very end of the month or the beginning of September.  The one thing we DID want to see, The Last Supper, in a church here in Milan, we couldn’t see.  Turns out the tickets to get into the church are SOLD OUT for the next two weeks straight.  Yes, two weeks.  We were amazed too.  And pissed off. 

We had quite an excursion trying to find a WC around here (bathroom), and walking to the San Siro.  San Siro, for you non-football fans, is the Holy Grail of football stadiums here in Milan.  Both Inter Milan and AC Milan play football there.  The stadium there is HUGE.  No wonder people love their football here, the stadiums are like cathedrals. 

Other than that, we went to a church here and walked around a lot.  Lots of pigeons.  Less people than in Venice.  Nice. 

We are heading to Torino tomorrow before going to Barcelona, since the train for tomorrow night was sold out (boo).  We hope Torino is nice and quiet like Florence was.  I wanna see all of the stuff ffrom the olympics.  It was there in winter 2006.

Sorry this post is so short.  The computer i’m on is very glitchy and is hard to type on.  Not a lot of time left to type! 

Finally, thanks for all of the great comments and messages.  We love reading them when we have the chance to stop in and read them.  We’re actively sending postcards so if you never gave me your address you can still email it to me at cat_brad@yahoo.com

Miss everyone and hope things are good in California (and the US in general).

Ciao.

We left Florence reluctantly yesterday after having a great time relaxing and seeing the sights around town, getting used to the laid back pace we hadn’t seen while we were in Rome.  Our entire experience there was amazing- great hostel, great people, great food… we already miss it there.  After waking up at around 7 to get our things together, we took our last stroll through Florence before arriving at the Firenze train station to board our Eurostar train to Venice.  One thing we’ve noticed about Italy are that there are McDonalds EVERYWHERE, in every train station, in every city we’ve seen so far.  It’s almost a bit sad- here we are in Italy having McDonalds McMuffins for breakfast when we should be eating Italian food for breakfast.  Italian breakfasts are coffee, though, so it’s better to have something than nothing at all.

The train ride was fine through Bologna and into Venice.  That’s when things got really interesting.  We got into the Venice San Lucia train station around 2 yesterday afternoon and after wandering around for 20 minutes confused and extremely frustrated (not to mention hot), we figured out that our hotel was on the MAINLAND in Venice and not in VENICE venice, if that makes any sense.  See, there’s a difference between Venice mainland and Venice the island of Venice, since it takes about a 10 minute regional train ride to get between the two.  To get back to the mainland, we hopped on a metro train for about €2 and finally figured out what our directions were telling us to do.  It was much easier, obviously, since we were taking the directions from the right train station and all.  Haha.

500 meters later, and a lot of sweat and frustration, we made it to our hotel on mainland Venice.  Let me be the first to say- this hotel is SHADY.  It’s in the middle of this residential street with no one around, like a ghost town and the walk under the passageway to get to and from the Mestre train station is hella creepy.  Lots of graffiti, lots of weird smells, just all around a very very weird place.

One thing about Italy that I had heard about, but not really seen yet, was that during the month of August many people leave the cities in Italy to go and vacation elsewhere.  Thus, many hotels, restaurants, and shops are closed down because everyone is gone.  On the mainland in Venice, everything is closed down.  Everything.  Last night we wandered around for almost an hour trying to find a single restaurant that was open, walking down these shady, dirty streets in the middle of nowhere.  Imagine downtown Oakland, but a million times worse.  And empty.  We finally found a little pizzeria near the Mestre station that was open, and I don’t think either of us have ever been so happy just to see a pizza place in our entire lives.  Let’s just say our stay in Venice hasn’t been off to a great start.

Our plan for today is to wander around the Grand Canal here on the island before heading to Milan tomorrow.  Our original plan was to go from Milan to Nice, but since everything in Nice is so expensive, all the hostels and the hotels, most likely we are going to go straight from Milan to Barcelona instead of stopping in the south of France.  It sucks, but that’s the way things go sometimes.  At least that will give us an extra couple of days in the UK to travel around, so it’s not completely disappointing.

On a completely unrelated note, I can’t believe we’ve only been in Europe for 6 days.  7 days?  Whatever.  Time here seems like it goes so slow.  Maybe that’s because all we do is walk around, look, talk to each other, eat, and sleep.  We’ve seen so much and been so many places, you’d think it would be taking a lot longer than it has been.  The UK seems so far away right now, and as much as we love seeing everything here in Italy, I think both of us see London as the peak of our travels around here.  Going pub hopping, watching football, and being in a country where people speak the same language as us.  While I think both of us enjoy the fact that we’re doing this together, looking around and exploring everything, it gets to be tiresome and lonely.

More than anything, though, Venice has worn us down.  Getting lost, being hot and sweaty, it doesn’t really make either of us want to jump up when we wake up in the morning.  I’m sure for a lot of people, Venice could be the pinnacle, the peak of their entire journey here in Europe, but for us we’re hoping that there’s a lot more out in the world than this.

I’m going to keep trying to find a place to put up our pictures from our travels here.  I haven’t been able to find anything yet, but hopefully sooner than later I’ll be able to post something.

Until next time, Ciao.