"I wish to be as 'big' as the statue in the main square..."

So I'm trying to play catch-up a little bit... there is so much to talk about and not enough time in the day to do it. But anywho, I left off on Friday afternoon. That night, I ended up in an Italian hospital. Before you get too freaked out, it wasn't me who needed the attention... apparently Jeremy is allergic to pesto sauce, and had a pretty bad reaction when he took two bites. He eventually turned almost purple (like Violet from Willy Wonka) and got hives and had swollen everything... yikes. So Ryan and I took him to the hospital, where two ladies working with Martin's son came and met us to make sure everything was OK. He ended up being fine, and got out for free. Hooray for Socialism (in this one isolated incident where we got to take advantage of someone else's tax dollars)!


What a baby. Stop complaining.

Saturday morning, we woke up and headed to the Verona train station around 8:00 AM... good preparation for classes, as we've since discovered. We got on the train without any trouble, and nobody even checked our tickets. Everyone here is just super trusting, apparently. We got to Verona around 11:00 AM, and immediately ran into the problem of our group being way, way too large. There were a good 15 of us, and we discovered pretty quickly that even deciding which direction to leave the train station was a problem. So we split up to go find somewhere to eat, and let me just say that despite the slight odor, Venice is an incredible, incredible place. I'm still not quite sure how they built it/ flooded it/ made a river running through the whole city, but... bravo, Venetians. Just look at the view from the first bridge we crossed:


Stunning.

So anyways, we just spent a lot of the day walking around and looking at all of the amazing buildings. We considered a gondola ride, but they were pretty expensive and we could only go two at a time. The hardest part was honestly just navigating through all of the tiny streets that have no particular names or indications of where to go... we finally found our way to St. Marco's Square, where the basilica and bell tower are. Wow. First of all, I just want to congratulate the Imagineers at Walt Disney World for what an amazing job they did at replicating the tower in the center of the Italy Pavilion at Epcot. Despite being a bit smaller, it is almost an exact replica (by appearance). It's still cool to see the real thing in person though. And the Basilica, though we didn't get to go inside (stupid tourists... the other ones clogging the entrance, i mean), was by far one of the most intricately designed buildings I have ever seen. The frescoes, the statuettes, the doors, the roof... all of the attention to detail is astounding. I would love to have an afternoon without all the other people around so I could study all of the art and history that's located on the outside of that one building, but unfortunately, I haven't mastered Sabrina the Teenage Witch's ability to stop time yet. I'm still working on that one.


Am I in Epcot or in Venice? Obviously Venice, but... you get my point.


I'M SO ARTSY. But seriously, the Basilica makes its own good pictures.

Also, while we were in the square, a parade started to go through St. Marco's square. It was all of these people dressed in Renaissance era garb, just walking through the square. Everyone was included, including the peasants, the townsfolk, the knights, the king, the jesters, along with sword jugglers and flag twirlers. I didn't realize sword jugglers were so prevalent back then.


This looks dangerous. Clearly their mothers were not as protective as mine.

We also visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection located off of some random side street in the Academia side of town. Because the art is all modern, there was some weird stuff.... but a lot of it was very, very cool. Not to mention the fact that there were multiple pieces of Picasso and Pollock throughout the museum, among others. Even if I didn't totally understand some of the paintings, just being in the presence of works like those is humbling. One cool thing that was in the museum was a tree dedicated to Peggy from Yoko Ono that is reserved for wishes. There was a small basket with slips of paper and pens next to the tree, and you write a wish down and put it onto the tree. There was a wide range of wishes, some meaningful, some not so much. The one we enjoyed was in French, but a French man read it out loud... you can guess from the title of the post, but the note referenced a statue in the courtyard of a man with a very, very large member. So that was good.


Aw.


Kind of blurry, but... silly Frenchmen.

The rest of the day was pretty laid back, and a large part of our initial group headed back to Verona. We stayed for dinner though, and found this amazing place located on the water. It was a beautiful, ridiculous view of the Grand Canal. I got a seafood risotto that was pretty good, but some other people got bigger meals that were really good as well. I was a little jealous of some of the other meals (Erin's lasagna... mmmm) but mine was pretty good too. All we really needed was the view though, as lame as that sounds. I'm really not trying to sound annoying about it, but half of the time I'm here I feel like I'm living someone else's life... it's hard to be unhappy eating dinner on the Grand Canal in Venice for the night. Insanity. Also, apparently I didn't take a picture of the view? Sometimes I question what the hell I'm thinking. Or not thinking, I guess.


Seafood! Risotto! Peas!

So anyways, we finally left Venice around 10:00 PM, and played games all the way to... not Verona. Apparently the train had a stop in the middle of Verona and Venice, which we didnt realize. It all worked out in the end, but it was interesting have the train conductor come onto the train and tell us that we were at the end of the line... in not Verona. But we made our connection, and everything was fine. Our connecting train was an overnighter that smelled of BO and feet and we had to stand, but it got us to where we needed to go. So, great success.

That's the end of this story... I'll have another post soon about the soccer game on Sunday, and then classes. We have a wine tasting tonight, so that should be pretty cool, and this weekend... FRENCH OPEN!!!! I can't even tell you all how excited I am... I'm accomplishing one of my 7 or 8 life goals by going this weekend. I already have my ticket for Friday, and am waiting to get my ticket for Saturday. It's like Christmas, but plus my Birthday and Easter and Kwanzaa. So pumped.

I miss you all and love you!