Heading to Venice

On December 30, 2011 we boarded a train bound for Venice (Venezia in Italian). We went on one of the fast trains and we were in first class which I liked. It was nicer and more comfortable. We arrived there at a little after two o'clock.

We walked out of the train station to take a bus to our stop at the Rialto bridge but all the buses were boats. It was fun and different. When we got off the bus we asked an Italian woman for directions. Actually my sister Kayla asked her in Italian. She was very nice and told us to follow her down a little alley where she pointed us in the right direction.

We found our bed and breakfast very easily and when we arrived we were warmly welcomed. We had a nice room with two windows that looked out over one of the canals. We watched the gondolas going by with the man singing. Bob and I even went on a gondola ride with the rest of my family. We went to a nice restaurant and I had spaghetti with bolognese. My sister had octopus.

The next day we took a walking tour of Venice which started at St Marks Square. We learned that the lion with the wings represents Mark who is one of the four evangelists. Three of them, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are represented by winged animals and John is represented by a winged angel. There is a clock in the square that only changes time every five minutes. On one side of the statue the numbers are Latin and the other side they are Arabic. We went into St Mark's Basillica. The ceiling is made of all gold. Sometimes when there is a high tide, parts of Venice including St Marks Square are partly underwater.

  

After the tour I took an a nap since we were going to be going to the fireworks at midnight. We went to dinner again and I had Tiramisu for dessert after my spaghetti. I ate a lot of spaghetti in Italy. We went over to St Mark's Square (San Marco in Italian) and got a nice spot at a wall right along the water. It was cold out. Bob and I waited and waited and finally a while after midnight the fireworks started. They were really close, almost right in front of us. They were long and really cool.

We went home right afterwards because we had an early flight in the morning to Paris. In the morning we took a boat taxi all the way down the Grand Canal and we met a car taxi which brought us the rest of the way to the airport. We flew from Venice to Paris really fast.