Venice: Night #1

VENICE IS BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!

When you exit the train station you are on the grand canal. It is crazy. This is tourist season and there are SOOOOOOOOOOO many people. It's pretty fun though. Our hostel is right off of the main "road"? and it is the craziest place I have ever stayed.

It is run by a Hungarian girl and a guy who is Afghani, but has lived in Venice for a long time. We don't want to pay for linen so we don't and we get put in a side room that seems to have been a closet-type space because there are 50 people staying our first night. It is extremely overbooked and a lot of people don't have pillows or blankets (me), but everyone is just very chill and cool and the main room has this long table in it that everyone just hangs around and talks at and the two who run the place made us dinner and we made sangria together and then the guy went out drinking with people at night. It was such a weird situation. I was freezing at night, but I got over it. haha.

The canals are so beautiful. Our first day there we just wandered around, got a piece of pizza for lunch, saw the Rialto, San Marco, took a ghetto gondola across the grand canal to see some statue of a naked boy holding a frog. There were so many people everywhere and masks too. I guess carnaval is a big thing in Venice and they just sell masks year round.

At night we bought a bottle of wine on our way back to the hostel to make sangria and ate pasta that Laura, the Hungarian, had made. It was DELICIOUS! rigatoni with mozzarella chopped up and zucchini. Delicious. We hung around and talked with some other students from the US, Australia, England, South Africa, etc. who are studying in Great Britain and thus have 3 weeks off for spring break! Crazy. The girls went to bed later...it was an exhausting day, but it was EJs birthday at midnight so he went out with Ahtik (I think that's who you spell his name - the guy who runs the place)and some other people from the hostel.