Venezia, Italia
We avoided Carnaval and discovered Venice on our own time. What we discovered is that from almost every point in Venice, if you look around, you'll see something like this.
This little view was on the way to our charming little apartment/b&b we stayed in for the night. (Sidenote: if you're staying in Florence or anywhere close, I would recommend just doing a really long day trip to Venice if your doing transport via train. Unless you're trying to see everything, a little trip will probably do fine for students and curious tourists.)
Also, public transportation (AKA BOAT) is really expensive. The good (and bad) news is we accidentally didn't validate our tickets at the stop leaving the train station, so we did get a free ride when we had to go back. I'm not recommending you do this, I'm just saying it happened. And was kind of nice.
After we got a little sit down conference from our hostess, we ventured out and found the Rialto market. We casually walked around eyeing some weird fish, whole squid, and dried veggies, but then we both spotted something in the hands of a woman that literally made our eyes bulge. Strawberries SO BEAUTIFUL we both said, "OOOOOOH," and immediately bought them.
Here they are in all their glory being enjoyed by the water:
During this small feast, I accidentally committed the worst sin, for which Allie almost shoved me into the canal...
I dropped one.
We spend most of our time by the water, wandering up and down the beautiful canals. We passed a lot of lovely sights, got very lost and confused, and enjoyed every bit.
The second day we were in Venice, we spent forever just sitting on the canal drinking champagne and Bellinis.
But the weird thing about Venice was that the days went by slower than I've ever experienced. I don't know if it was our early morning starts, but we thought we'd been sitting by the canal for hours and it had be 25 minutes. And your hour long walk around a park will only be 15 minutes. So keep in mind that Venice is maybe the Bermuda Triangle. ~magic~
And if you're trying to eat dinner earlier than 7pm, forget about it because everything will be closed and you'll be starving and regretting not bringing snacks. So bear that in mind. It's not as big of a city as Florence; things really do close.
But the best part about seeing other Italian towns is the little things.
It's great to get little side street sneak peeks of how people really live in touristy cities.
Shots like this are my favorite.
