I'm so behind

I know I haven't uploaded pictures in so long and that will change I promise! I did want to write a bit about Venice and I only have a bit of time - I'm destressing after my Art & Architecture midterm - so here you are....

Friday after our Italian mid-term, we returned home to pack super fast and get to the train station by 10. Our train left around 10.30 and we were to arrive in Venice around 5 am. Naturally, what we thought would be a quiet trip full of sleeping and studying, turned into an all night birthday party on the train. Two of the Loyola kids in the program were celebrating their 21st birthdays - on the train. When midnight struck, I'm pretty sure we woke up the whole train. It was a fun, if exhausting trip. We arrived in Venice and took a cab to our campground - oh yes, no hostels were left in the city, so we were staying about 15 minutes across the water at a campground with literally, sheds for rooms.

We slept for a couple hours and went to venice around 1 pm. We spent the day exploring, suddenly realizing we were in the middle of parades, and eating delicious carnivale foods. There were probably five hundred million people there. In St. Mark's square, there were people dressed as dinosaurs, on stilts, with literally close to a 60 foot neck. It was one of the scariest moments of my whole life!

After a long day of exploring Venice, we had a nice Valentines Day dinner by the Rialto, on the side of the Grand Canal. I had spaghetti with clams and we each only had one course, because it was all that we could afford. We spent most of the night hanging out in St. Mark's Square watching parades, people floating around and playing instruments, and basically enjoying ourselves.

The next day, we went back into the city for more wandering and after getting stuck in streets that were so small no more than two people could get through at a time (and there were at least a million trying to all go through the same part) we gave up and just explored for a while.

We upgraded our train tickets and took a fast train back to Rome - our trip which took 7 hours to get there only took 4 or so to get back.

It was great to be in Venice, which is such a beautiful city, it just was a very overwhelming trip due to the huge number of people who were all trying to be in Venice all at the same time.

Anyway, this week is going to be really busy thanks to papers and such, but our weekend will be really great - we aren't going anywhere far, we're going to a Buffalo farm to see the Buffalo (which aren't really buffalo, but just a type of cow) that make mozzarella di bufalo. YUM!

So, I'll put up pictures of Venice and of Tuscany soon, so keep a look out for those!