Thursday, June 4, 2009

Eat and Be Eaten

Today was fun…exciting…perhaps too exciting at times, though.

We started the day off at the Galleria Academia to see Michelangelo’s statue of David. It is impossible to imagine how someone can take a giant stone and turn it into something so incredible. The description in front of the statue had a quote regarding the Michelangelo’s masterpiece, it something like: “one does not need to bother viewing any other statue after viewing Michelangelo’s David.” I really can’t put it any better; the expression on his face all the way down to the details of the tendons and arteries in his hands are indescribably perfect (there I tried anyways). After seeing David we walked around Florence a little more, got some groceries, a pizza for lunch, and headed to the train station in time to catch the train to Venice…so we thought.

Yesterday we went to the train station to check on departure times for Venice and decided on the one at 1:36 pm. So we got to the train station about 1:15 with plenty of time to spare…once again, so we thought. When we arrived we looked at all of the departure boards only to find that there were no 1:36 departures to speak of. We frantically found the first uniformed train worker in site and showed them the itinerary we had printed yesterday, only to get the response “sorry, too late, wrong station”. We failed to realize that while most trains depart from the main station (which is where we were) that this train departed from the next station down the line. The lady told us we could try to take the train from platform 3 to the next station but that we’d only have 1 minute to transfer to the appropriate platform for our train to Venice. Since we didn’t want to wait two hours for the next departure we ran as fast as we could (backpacks and all) to the train on platform three…we got on the train, arrived at the next station at 1:33 and got on the train to Venice just in time…phew.

Our time in Venice is brief, just today, so once we arrived we got a pizza for dinner and then started walking the infamous water-laden town. One thing we definitely like about Venice is the price of the gelato, only 1.20 for a generously size single scoop cone. After pizza I got a caramel-chocolate combination and Erica got lime-strawberry (mine was better). Another thing we found out about Venice is that there’s no such thing as a straight path, and it takes a long time to get where you’re going. All we really did was walk to San Marco Pier and back to take in the sites of the town, but it was plenty to keep us entertained and definitely enough to exhaust us as well. On the way back we got what might be our last Italian gelato (very sad); I got strawberry and berry, Erica got mint-chocolate (once again I can say for certain that mine was better). Last thing about Venice…mosquitoes…it seems they enjoy us about as well as we enjoy our gelato.

Tomorrow we set sail for Greece!

No comments:

Post a Comment