Day 1 was the first and only problem-free travel day. Our train left at 8:30 from the stop right across from my housing, convenient I know. I didn’t sleep much (at all) the night before. I was too excited, and I had to do laundry, and I kept repacking my backpack. It turned out I packed very efficiently; the only thing I didn’t wear was my bathing suit. My housing has free breakfast, so I grabbed a sandwich and ran to meet Chloe and Charlotte at the train station.
Background information/introductions- Charlotte is my friend from A&M who is also studying in Vienna. Chloe and Charlotte went to high school together, and she is studying in Wales this semester and also got a 3 week Easter Break. Chloe and Charlotte were the navigators of the trip; I am slightly directionally challenged. But I had a watch! So I kept us on time, that’s an important job right?
The train ride was around 5 hours; thank goodness I needed time to nap. When I wasn’t sleeping the scenery was gorgeous. The mountains and countryside here are breathtaking. We had to switch to a bus at some small town in Italy, and we thought we were going to miss it, but we didn’t (looking back now, we were way too worried about that), and were dropped off in Venice. We were only a short 10-minute train ride away from our final destination. When we got into Venice we bought a map and headed to our hotel… or so we thought. Venice was a little bit hard to navigate in because there weren’t street signs on every street, and when there were there was no guarantee that it would be on the map. But one nice thing about Italy, was that if we looked the slightest bit lost someone would offer to help us; even this one old man who didn’t let the fact that he didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Italian stop him from trying to point us in the right direction. We found our hotel; we had a 3 person private room that night, and it was so nice! We went to find food. Italian pizza and wine, nothing is better. Then we went to bed, it was an exhaustingly wonderful first day.
The next day we saw St. Mark’s Basilica; it was beautiful. Then we just walked around the city; the canals really make it gorgeous. We stared longingly wishing someone would pay 80 Euro for us to go on a gondola ride; I thought about trying to flirt my way on to one, but chickened out. That afternoon we had our first real gelato experience, and I think we had gelato everyday in Italy after that. That night we bought a deck of cards (best purchase of the trip… they were a little steep at 6 Euro), and just hung out and played cards in Venice. It felt absolutely surreal that I was actually there. Hearing all of the Italian made me wish I were learning it instead of German (that’s not going well, by the way).
The next morning we went to the train station with hopes of getting on a 10 o’clock train to Rome. We waited in line to get reservations and were informed that there were no open spots until the 2 o’clock train. Awesome. It turned out well though, we sat outside in the beautiful weather playing cards, and then in a few short hours we were on our way to Rome.
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