Today Rachel and I left Savannah for our 9 day trip to the beautiful country of Italia. In the morning we dropped Chauncey off at our neighbors, who were kind enough to watch him for us the whole time we're gone. After dropping him off we headed to the airport and got on our flight. We had a about 4 hour layover in JFK before getting on our 7 hour flight to Milan. The flight to Milan itself was pretty smooth I watched 3 movies and they served 2 meals (dinner and breakfast). The flight was overnight and of course I couldn't get any sleep on the plane Which left me exhausted when we finally landed.
We landed in Milan around 8:30 local time (2:30 Savannah time). We were able get off of the plane and through customs really quickly. The reason we chose to fly into Milan was because it was almost $500 cheaper than flying into any of the other cities, but since our first stop was Venice we had to get from the airport to the train station. This turned out to be a mush more difficult trip than expected! First, we were supposed to take a train from the airport to Milano centrale (the main train depot), however, the person in the train ticket booth told us to get on a different train that went to Milano Cadorna. We had less than 5 minutes to get on the train before it departed so we didn't have time to figure out it was the wrong train. Thankfully it didn't take us too far out of the way and we were able to take the metro from Cadorna to Milano centrale which was a couple miles north. More hassle ensued at the metro station when none of our credit or debit cards worked to buy tickets! We ended up having to walk all the way out of the metro and find an ATM to withdraw cash (which we didn't have time to do in the airport) and then go back and get our tickets. Thankfully everything worked out and we got to the main train depot just in time to buy our tickets to Venice (which was also more difficult than it should have been) and run to catch the 10:30am train with only a few minutes to spare!
Made it on the train!
The ride to Venice was much smoother and gave us a chance to relax a bit. The ride took a little over 2 hours. Once we got out of the station we navigated our way to our hostel. The city is built like a maze! Luckily I was able to use my phones GPS otherwise I don't think there's any way we would've found our hotel through all the nameless winding alleys of the island. On the way we crossed over the ponte di Rialto bridge which unfortunately was covered in scaffolding due to restoration efforts. Once we made it to the hostel we showered and changed and went out to meet our friends Patryk and Sarah (who arrived the night before) for lunch. We ended up going to a random restaurant in one of the the alleys. Of course since this was our first meal in Italy I had to try the pizza! It was a lot different than in used to, the crust was thin and the don't use a lot of sauce but it was delicious!
Grand canal in Venice
After dinner we went to explore the piazza San Marco, which is basically the main big square in Venice. There we went to the top of the bell tower and got to see some awesome views of the city. Afterwards we walked the streets of Venice, had some gelato, and taking a gondola ride through the many canals of Venice. The ride lasted about 30 minutes and our tour guide pointed out the Marco Polo house, the fishermans market, ponte di Rialto bridge, and a few other landmarks I can't remember.
After the ride we went to Pat and Sarah's hostel which had a rooftop area to hang out. We also booked our train tickets to Florence online for tomorrow.
After hanging out for an hour or so we went to grab a quick bite to eat. Rachel and I weren't very hungry after our late lunch so thought we would split dinner. Apparently this is very offensive to some chefs and we were kicked out of the first restaurant we went to! We ended up at another place across the alley which didn't mind us splitting a meal. We had some pasta which was good and then made our way back to the hostel. Finally we were able to get some sleep after being awake for over 30 hours!
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