The jaded travelers go to Venice (Becky)

We had been hoping that the Saturday night overnight trains would be empty, since everyone is hypothetically out partying at fantastic Italian discoteques. Not our luck. Our train car was filled with an Italian couple and two guys, one of whom was listening to cassette tapes (!!) and kept dropping his Walkman on the floor. So of course, there was no foot room, lots of leg cramps, and almost no sleep. We arrived around7 am to the Mestre station, on the mainland across from Venice, and took a bus up to the campground we planned to stay at. The campground was overpriced, like everything in this area, but still a good deal compared to hotel prices anywhere near Venice. We set up our tent and slept until 2pm.

In the afternoon, we took the long bus-> train ride over to Venice. And the first authentic Italian attraction to greet us outside of the station was, of course, a Native American tribal band wearing full traditional garb and playing the pan flute. They were unbelievably popular, as if the tourists didn’t realize that they were not the least bit native to Venice.

We wandered Venice for a few hours. We made the mistake of eating lunch at the train station, then realizing that all there is to do in Venice is eat and shop. The size of our budget and our backpacks stopped us from shopping, so all we could do was wander around and wait until we got hungry enough to eat. The canals were nice and the whole boating culture was interesting, but I think we were generally underwhelmed with the city. Anyway, we got some gelato that wasn’t as good as we had in Rome, explored a few free museums that were themed by countries/regions (Taiwan, Ireland, North Ireland, and Russia), and then got food at the supermarket to eat back at our campground in the evening.

It started raining that night, so we ate our bread and cheese meal in the tiny section of our tent that is large enough to allow sitting up completely. We heard music and yelling by the camp's bar, so we headed over to watch a bunch of drunk Americans sing karaoke (and all sing along to a couple of songs we didn’t know, which made me feel very old and out of touch). It then transformed into a dance party where we danced to a few songs before heading to bed.

The rain overnight caused our tent to start leaking in a small area on one side. Not a huge disaster, but enough to make it impossible to sleep in about half of our extremely small barely-fits-two-people tent. Grr.