Back In Barcelona

Whoo! So I got back into Barcelona last night around 11:30. I was exhausted, and just took a shower and fell asleep.

So the second day in Florence was pretty light. Mainly just chilled out and tried to recuperate a little, and the train left that night for Venice. We get into Venice at about 11:30pm, and it appears that no one really checked to see where our hostel was that we were staying at. So 12 people are all bumbling around trying to figure out what's going on, and it's just a mess. Luckily we at least know that we have to take a bus there, so we're only bumbling around the bus station, instead of the entire city (which is a complete maze, btw). We finally find a native who speaks english and knows where it is we are trying to go. The place was called Camp Fusina, and was an entire camping village. Pretty cool, except that you could only get there by bus or ferry, which really ended up messing with our nightlife in Venice. Or provided us with really good stories about how we got back, depending on how you look at it. Lol.

But Venice was beautiful. The architectural influences there seemed to be a mix of the standard ancient Roman style, and Arabic. You got all of your arches and columns and field repetition on the building facades, but then you had things like the gondolas, which have really cool curves and looked very Arabic (as far as I could tell anyways). The street of Venice make absolutely no sense at all, but are still very pretty to walk down. It tends to be kind of a tight feeling with all the buildings around you and the small streets, so you constantly feel almost cradled by the city, like its kind of hugging you (or looming over you, if it's night).

We did less of the standard fare tourist sites in Venice, cause we were starting to get worn out on them by this time. But we did have to see the giant plaza with the Basillica. For those of you who have seen the movie, "The Italian Job," this is the square at the beginning of the movie where Frank calls his daughter from when he wakes her up. Also the place where he's talking to Charlie and uses the line: "See those pillars over there? That's where they used to string up thieves who felt fine." Saw those pillars. They're pretty cool actually. And Venice looks exactly like it did in the Italian Job, too. That was pretty cool to see.

So we got to the square and just chilled out for a little bit. A couple of guys in the group had a thing for Cuban cigars, and there was a place selling them on the edge of the square, so we all got Romeo and Juliets and sat on the steps of the Piazza San Marco and just enjoyed the view.

Then we played with the pigeons.

In Piazza San Marco, there are pigeons everywhere. And they're not shy, either. There are little vendors in the square that sell corn to feed the pigeons with, and if you hold out a handful of corn, they will fly right up to your arm and fight each other on your hand for the corn. Definitely pretty entertaining. So of course we did things like put pigeons on people's heads, catch a pigeon, make them stick their heads way down into the bag to get the corn, etc etc.

Then we had to take the obligatory gondola ride. Luckily we had a pretty talkative gondolier, so we completely grilled him with questions about what it's like being a gondolier. He was a very cool guy. It turns out that the gondoliers (at least the ones we went through), work for a single company, but they own their gondolas. And how much does it cost to buy a new gondola, you ask? Just take a random guess. Turns out that a new gondola costs about 50,000 euro, which is somewhere in the range of $70,000. Whoa. He had been a gondolier for 22 years, starting when he was 23.

And what does it take to drive a gondola? Well if you're in the Grand Canal, where there's plenty of space, you can learn it in about 6 months or so. He made the analogy to driving a car. But to be a gondolier for this company, it takes years of work to get that good. His analogy was that anyone can drive a car, but not many people can drive Formula 1. So they're the Formula 1 of gondoliers. And it was pretty apparant. At the beginning of our tour, he was on his cell phone with one hand, and steering the gondola with the other. And I'm not talking down a nice straight canal. It was a tight fit and he made the turns with no problems at all. At other points, there were turns where the front of the gondola was inches from a wall, while the side of the gondola was inches from a corner. It was definitely some impressive manuevering.

At one point one of the girls asked him to sing for us, but he said he only sings in the shower and while making love. So her retort was, "So you've never made love in your gondola?" Lol. It didn't phase him a bit. He said that he had, and that it's very romantic being on the water in a gondola. Lol. He was a great guide. Also turns out he spoke 4 languages, had biceps about the size of my head, and looked maybe 30 when he was 45.

So after gondola-ing, we just kinda shopped around Venice. Or window shopped, at least. The two things that are everywhere in Venice are masks, and blown glass. I'm not sure what the deal is with the masks. I'm talking like super-ornate, masquerade ball type of masks. All amazingly beautiful. I kinda wish I had bought one now, but travelling with it would have been very difficult.

So our first night in Venice we stayed at the hostel, which has it's own bar, that was an absolute crazy mess. Imagine a bunch of young people travelling around, and all of them have a bar just to themselves. That's pretty much what it was like. So we figured we weren't drunk enough to be bumped into every 5 seconds, so we got our drinks and headed out to the playground. We definitely found the swings and had the swing-long-jump contest, like you used to in 3rd grade. I won (and the crowd goes wild). Lol. Then someone ran us off cause we were being too loud, and just before we went back to our rooms, we saw all the bartenders hanging out, cause the bar had closed a little bit before. And these bartenders don't just hang out. One of the girls was spinning fire on chains. You may have seen something like this with silk ropes with weights on the end of them, where they dance around and spin them in really cool patterns. Except these were metal chains, with kerosene soaked sponges on the ends of them. So she was dancing around with two fireballs flying around her. It definitely goes on the list of coolest things I've seen a person do.

So of course I had to try it. :-O

I only did it with one fireball instead of both of them, and that worked out pretty well. I think I managed to only hit myself once. But that really does no damage to you at all, cause the thing just hits you and bounces right off. You still have to be pretty careful with them, but it was damn fun. I did one for about 5 min, then tried two with both of them not lit, and managed to hit myself about 3 times in 1 min. Lol. Guess it's a good thing I didn't try two lit.

The next night we stayed with people in the Oxford study abroad program, which was out in Padova (Padua), a suburb of Venice. Then our last night was the night we decided we were going to go out in Venice. Apparantly Venice only has one dance club. I'm not sure if there were some kind of syntactic stipulations that made that only half-true, but everyone was saying that yes, this is Venice's only dance club. So the ferry stopped running before midnight, and the busses were a mess, so we definitely had to like get a taxi or something to get back. Everyone left the club at different times, and no one got back to the hostel before dawn, cause no one could figure out how to get there. It was pretty hysterical. I definitely didn't get any sleep that night. So the next day was our last in Venice. A lot of people had a train back to Rome, and then flew back from there, but I flew out that day from Venice, so I just hopped a bus to the airport (which I fell asleep in), chilled at the airport for a few hours (where I fell asleep about 5 times), and then chilled in my terminal, once they would let me (where I fell asleep and was awoken by a stewardess after everyone else had already boarded the plane). The plane took off, I fell asleep, I woke up, and the plane was landing in Barcelona. So it was a great flight. Lol.

Now I'm back here, cleaned up the room, did some laundry, and am ready for classes tomorrow. Woo woo! I can't believe I get to do this again in two weeks. I'm already looking forward to it. I'm probably going to do Interlaken, Oslo, and Amsterdam. Interlaken is a city that is home to many extreme sports, and a bunch of the guys are going there on the second trip. They've got sky-diving, bungee jumping, caving, rafting, hang-gliding, para-gliding, and maybe some other stuff. I'll probably be there for 3 days, and do bungee jumping, caving, rafting, and maybe hang gliding. I don't think I can afford the sky diving, since I've done it once already and it's the most expensive thing. Though sky diving over the Alps would be pretty awesome. So we'll see. Oslo has a music festival that is going on during our second week, and Amsterdam is Amsterdam. Plans are definitely open to interpretation, but this is the rough draft so far.

Talk to you guys soon. Love ya!