Last Day in Italy

Well I woke up this morning and realized that the huge bites I had everywhere had gone down moderately but more importantly that I hadn’t got any more bites. So, I’m fairly sure that I don’t actually have bedbugs, which is good news. Must have been some pretty sizeable mosquitoes though. We had to pack up our things and put them in the lobby since we’ll be back on the road tonight. Just before we left our room, we took advantage of the (free!) wifi and booked our flights back home. It was tough having to decide between a Thursday morning flight, which was the cheapest but only gave us two days in Barcelona or a Friday night flight that would effectively give us four days in Barcelona, but it would cost an extra $100 and also gave us a 9-hour layover in Dublin. That wasn’t exactly how I planned to spend my first time in Ireland. Eventually we decided on the earlier flight, which would give me a chance to get home in time for my mom’s birthday. With that, however, Kristine promised to wake up early to get the most out of our two days in Barcelona. This was the first time that our last minute planning didn’t work totally in our favor. Arthur recommended buying plane tickets either far in advance or at the last minute for the best deals and since this whole trip was kind of last minute, the flight home was never going to be cheap. For whatever reason, even when I first started planning for this trip, the flights home were about 300 more than the flights there. I have been monitoring the prices every chance I get and they went up by about $100 even when looking a few days before and after the day we wanted to leave. In this case, it was worth the $100 because of the flexibility it offered since so much of the trip was left open, but in the future, I think I would buy the tickets there and back way in advance but leave the rest up in the air to figure out as I go.

Anyways, we hit up the same sandwich shop from yesterday, it was frustrating because I hate repeating but it was literally the only cheap stop we had seen in all of our travels yesterday and the sandwiches filled us up for a good price. Interestingly, this little place has waiters, which struck us as odd since its really no more than a little deli. Its funny how all across Italy, they try to avoid giving you meat at all costs. Either they think that they can substitute mozzarella for meat or they give you one, maybe two thin slices of meat. I can’t wait for a huge Wegman’s sub when I get home. A 14 inch costs about 7.50 and lasts me for about two meals and costs roughly the same or less than these 5 and 6 euro sandwiches that don’t even fill me up. Afterward, we headed to the Palazzo Ducal (Doge’s Palace) on the Piazza San Marco and bought the combination ticket for the Palace and the Museo Civico Correr on the palace’s bottom floor. Immediately I noticed how dead it was inside the museum, similar to the campanile yesterday that had no lines to get to the top even at sunset. I’m not sure whether this is because the attractions are so ridiculously expensive or whether people simply would rather explore the beauty of Venice than be cooped up inside. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. The museum was an interesting narrative on the history of Venice although both Kristine and I are starting to reach our limit on cultural activities. One thing I did like was that in each room there were signs explaining the significance of the room or its contents in a variety of languages. The Doge was the traditional leader of the republic of Venice but was mostly just a figurehead. Nevertheless, the palace was both beautiful and extravagant, with some rooms rivaling the grandeur of Versailles in both size and ornate decoration. One room where the leaders of government once met was said to be the largest room in Europe and had a ceiling beautifully decorated with remarkable detail.

One oddity of the Palace was that it also housed Venice’s jails in the same building where the Doge lived. The jails might take the cake as the smelliest place in an already fairly smelly continent. I think that the smell came from the frequent floods in Venice leaving behind enough moisture for mold and mildew to take hold since they were on the ground floor. We were able to walk across the so-called Bridge of Sighs, named because it connected the judicial offices where prisoners were sentenced to the jails themselves and the prisoners were said to sigh as they walked across the bridge and glimpsed their last view of Venice out of the small windows on the bridge before being locked up. After our tour, we were back on the Piazza San Marco and walked around the shops for a bit. Many of the shops have Murano glass, which I had heard of but did not realize that Murano was an island that was just off the main islands of Venice. Arthur recommended a day trip to the islands of Murano and Burano if we had a third day in Venice which we will regrettably not have time for. One shop even had glass handblown to resemble balloon animals which was a clever idea but cost upwards of a few thousand euros. Needless to say, the shops around San Marco were way out of our price range to actually buy anything from. Kristine grabbed a gelato and we sat down on the steps as close as possible to a restaurant to enjoy one of the many house orchestras without having to pay a ridiculous table charge for the pleasure. However, I ended up paying in a different way when a pigeon’s poop landed on my shorts as we were sitting there. After Kristine grabbed a few napkins for me, we headed back to our hotel so that I could wash it off with water and more importantly wash my hands. While we’re on the subject of poop, Kristine and I have noticed an interesting fashion trend here and to a lesser extent all around Europe where girls wear enormously baggy kapris that evoke memories of MC Hammer and parachute pants. We’ve come to call them poop shorts because it makes people look like they have a load in their pants.

By this point in the day, it was starting to get late and we had to grab an early dinner so that we could get back on the road and catch our flight at 11 to head to Barcelona. We decided to explore a new section of Venice by walking from San Marco along the water on the Riva degli Schiavoni in hopes of finding a restaurant along the way. The two restaurants in Frommer’s that we had wanted to try the most were interestingly closed on both Sunday and Monday which happened to be the two days we were in Venice so we were on our own. On our trek we saw the outside of the Bridge of Sighs which we had seen pictures of everywhere in Venice. Unfortunately, this picturesque sight was covered in advertisement billboards which needless to say ruined its beauty. There were a few decent restaurants along the way that we thought about stopping at, but out of dumb luck, we decided to forge on and eventually found the little gem of a street-the Via Garibaldi. It had a bunch of restarants and was the first place we had found in Venice that wasn’t overrun by tourists. We had been talking the past few days about how we couldn’t escape the touristy parts of Venice as souvenir shops and overpriced restaurants seemed to line every street. We were blown away that in our travels we had yet to see even a grocery store or a fruit stand. It seemed as if nobody actually lived in Venice but rather just commuted to work in the service industry. However, Via Garibaldi immediately became my favorite place in Venice. Side streets looked like they were actually lived in and there were plenty of fruit stands, grocery and hardware stores, not to mention a cluster of reasonably priced restaurants. I later noticed that one of Arthur’s restaurants we had wanted to go to was on the Garibaldi, so we had certainly lucked out. The food was pretty good and the wine was fantasic and cheap yet again. I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but restaurants in Europe give you little business cards with your check which for us was a nice way to remember all of the places we have been.

If I ever came back to Venice I would definitely try to find a hotel in this area. San Marco is great to visit, but is a bit overrated in my opinion. When we walked through San Marco on the way back to our hotel, we also saw that most people had cleared out of the Piazza and unfortunately left behind all kinds of litter and trash. We quickly grabbed our bags and hopped onto a vaporetto to get to the bus stop that would take us to the airport. I would highly recommend taking a vaporetto at night to see Venice from the Grand Canal at night. The water was a bit choppy and I was very surprised to see that the gondolas were very stable in the water. On neither the vaporetto nor the bus was there any kind of ticket check which we were surprised by. We got to the airport with plenty of time, especially since the plane was running about a half hour late. The flight was pretty quick, but we still got into Barcelona pretty late, around 1:30am. We hopped on a bus that took us to the Placa Catalunya, which was just a few blocks from our hotel. However, lacking a map, Kristine pushed for a taxi which took us to the Pension Miami, which wasn’t in the greatest part of town. Between the taxi driver warning us to hold onto our things tightly and two separate friends who have spent semesters abroad in Barcelona warning of the pickpocketing, Kristine is pretty nervous and not crazy about Barcelona. Regardless, we made it to our hotel without a problem and passed out around 3am.