And back to our regularly scheduled traveling nightmare

Sooooo...Now I'm at O'Hare and apparently my flight no longer exists! Super fun. I managed to get back into the states without a problem. But when I went to check in for my connecting flight through United after going through Customs and what not the ticket county lady was like "oh your connecting flight doesn't exist anymore. You didn't get rebooked and all the flights are full until tomorrow at 9:30pm. You can try to fly standby until then." Awesome. So now I get to go have stern talks with people and hope to get on a flight at some point in the next couple of days.

Zzzzz....

At Airport soo tired... Vienna Awesome..

Oops . . . Now in Vienna

So this whole blogging everyday thing fell apart very quickly for two reasons.

Reason number one: Matt wouldn’t let me stop walking. As soon as he arrived it was a non-stop walkathon. “Look at this church,” Matt would say, “now let’s look at this one on the OTHER SIDE of the city.” Then we would walk about a block and a half and get lost. We had a most fantastic tour of the myriad dead ends of Venice.

(Matt would like to here indicate that this is in fact not true, and would further like to point out that we spent plenty of time on all kinds of boats, and waiting for all kinds of boats, and sitting at the wells in every piazza and campo in Venice).

Sure every once in a while I would prevail upon Matt’s sense of mercy to allow me to sit on any available surface. Lucky for me the water fountains of Venice are not only easily located and make great seats, but they are of great historical import and require close inspection by the truly dedicated traveler.

(Matt would now like to point out that Gaby’s idea of “prevailing upon my sense of mercy” is just sitting down and refusing to move. Also sometimes demanding foot rubs.)

Compounding the issue, my once cushiony comfy Dr. Scholl’s foam inserts (no gel insoles on airplanes or the terrorists win!) completely crapped out. The first two days in Venice were wet and rainy, and though I did not experience sloshing through acqua alta I was introduced to each and every puddle that could be found on Giudecca as I searched for a supermarket. My only pair of shoes were soaked for two days straight and, combined with my feet pounding on hard cobblestones, Dr. Scholl decided that the doctor would be out for the remainder of the trip. Given this information, one could easily understand my utter exhaustion at the end of each day.

Reason number two: Our hostel had spotty internet access. No reason was given just that every couple of days the internet would stop working for a couple of more days. So out of the six days I was there we only had internet access for two days.

Theoretically, wi-fi should be easier to get here in Vienna so we’ll try to do better. Meanwhile I may backdate some posts that I meant to have up earlier.

Love,

Gaby and Matt

Days 1-2

Well it's good that if Matt had to miss any days of this vacation it was these two first days. Though it's been pretty warm (I scoff at coats...scoff scoff) it's been gloomy and rainy. The rain isn't torrential so it isn't bothering me that much but it makes it so that I can't really take my camera all the time. I've worked out a highly fashionable system in which I hang the camera around my neck and cover it with a scarf while not in use. The worst bits are the puddles. I spent a lot of energy on the my first morning trying not to step in puddles but by the afternoon my only pair of shoes and feet were soaked anyway.



I've been wandering around town trying to limit my sightseeing to things that Matt may not want to see. Which I don't think is a lot. I've spent most of my time just exploring. I've decided who ever designs casinos must have taken lessons from the Venetians. The area that composes most of Venice is pretty small so getting lost is near impossible. It seems that all roads lead to the Piazza de San Marco. I've picked roads at random and just walked and inevitably I end up back at the Piazza.



It hasn't been lonely though. I've lucked out and have met Carly a really nice Canadian girl who is traveling alone through Europe for three months. We've hung out and explored town together and last night we got to know two of our other roomates: Pauline and Jane, a hilarious mother and daughter duo from Australia. Pauly and Jane were great to talk to and they broke out some gin that they "HAD" to get rid off before their next leg of travel to the states. We chatted and drank the verboten gin in our room until about 11:30 when we got told to shut up. :-)

This my friends is why I love hostels.

Arriving in Venice

I got in to Venice at about midnight on Sunday night. It was raining and all of the people who were on the half empty plane with me were Italian and knew how to get where they were going and well...left. I had been a little bit concerned about this part of the trip because the airport is not in Venice proper and you have to take a bus/train to the islands and then there is a waterbus to the island where the hostel is located. That isn't so bad but during my research I couldn't find anywhere that listed how late any of these services ran. Worst case scenario I could take a taxi and then a water taxi to the hostel but that would easily cost me 100 Euros. Ok, so that wasn't really worst case scenario because I just wouldn't pay that much to go anywhere. Worst case scenario really was standing outside the airport until public transit started running again. After a few minutes of wandering I found a bus ticket window and the nice lady sold me a ticket to get into the city. She didn't warn me about there no longer being any waterbus service in town so I took it as a good sign. In town I followed people towards the water and found the waterbus stop pretty quickly. Yay! For the late night Italian partiers there is a late night water bus service that runs until 4:30 am. After traveling for 24 hours the waterbus ride to the island was refreshing and it felt like a reassuring welcome to Venice.

web access

Postings may get a little less frequent as all research shows that Venice has yet to discover free wifi.