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| Venezia |
With coursework squarely in the books and my degree firmly guaranteed, it was just about time for one last road trip…EuroTrip style. We set out on July 5 for a 10-day train/plane trek through Northern Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and the south of France (and we even apparently passed through Lichtenstein, whatever that is…and possibly a thin sliver of Germany, it’s hard to say for sure, but that little bit of the trip did seem pretty boring and humorless…so it probably was).
As always, you can find all the photographic evidence in the photo albums linked from the homepage (as I post them).
- The first leg of the journey was a flight from London Stansted to Bergamo Airport (serving Milan). I’m pretty sure this all went quite well…though it was more than 10 days ago now and my memory doesn’t really go back that far. In my defense, we were pretty much Party Rocking, LMFAO style the entire trip, so a few lapses are to be expected. Anyway, we made it to Milan relatively on time and after a bus ride from the airport to the central Milan train station, we hiked to our hotel, bags in tow. Luckily, I had printed out a poorly labeled Google map to guide us…we found it in under two hours for sure…no problem.
- Now, I’m sure there is something attractive and interesting about Milan, but I can’t say that we found it. Granted, we arrived in the evening and left the next day at noon, but all we saw was a typical industrial city. If you’re planning a trip to Italy and working with limited time or resources, I would skip Milan. However, we did get a pretty solid picture of the train station (our only Milan photograph).
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| Classic shot of Milan... |
- Next stop was Venice…or as I like to call it, The City of Pizza and Gelato. Overall, Venice is great. Beautiful architecture…the canals…beautiful churches…the central square…weird statues, pretty much everything you could want.
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| Lovely Canals... |
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| More Canals... |
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| Lovely architecture (and nice buildings too)... |
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| Beautiful churches... |
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| Take that Ronald McDonald! |
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| Naked Boy holding up a crab...with security guard standing by to prevent shenanigans...can't imagine of what type |
- We didn’t manage to take the classic gondola ride…the prices are a bit exorbitant. Plus, you have to pay extra if you want to add on the singer. We did see one gondola complete with singer and four sufficiently old white people that like to throw money away. I was glad to see that the look on the one guy’s face in the boat clearly said, while looking on at the old gentleman who was serenading them, “This is way more awkward than even I thought it would be…”
- One travel note on Venice, it’s not ideal for the movement impaired. Definitely not handicap friendly with the stepped bridges and no cars within the canal district (which is a pretty awesome feature otherwise).
- I believe we had gelato a combined 5 or 6 times in two days and pizza at least 4 times…seriously. Some of the gelato was fruit flavored though…so it was pretty much health food. Needless to say, the little Italian guy at the pizzeria/gelataria across the street from our hotel was sad to see us go.
- In what will become a recurring theme in this EuroTrip blogfest…we didn’t do very much traditional sightseeing in Venice (or anywhere really, besides Salzburg). Other than wandering into a few churches, we pretty much stuck to the streets and soaked in the atmosphere. This was perfect for me, because there’s nothing I like more than keeping it real…and really getting in the trenches with the locals. Especiallly in Marseille…more on that later. That and spending ample time in the hotel watching music videos. There’s definitely something about not having a TV at home that compels you to watch anything that is on when you get access to one in a hotel. We even watched a French language movie because it starred Audrey Tautou (of Amelie fame)…seemed like a pretty good movie. But most of our TV-watching time was spent catching up on music videos…particularly LMFAO’s PartyRock Anthem (question: Great song…or best song ever??).
- Anyway, that’s about it for Part I. Our next stop was Salzburg. I think I hear something in the hills…is it music?
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