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A city of canals
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Venice is the most expensive place to stay in Italy so we decided to try camping as a cheap alternative. a lot of the back packers we talked to said that camping in Venice is a great cheap way to stay there. for €15 a night you can stay in a little trailer that has beds and it's warm, it is just on a campground as opposed to €35 a night in the actual city of Venice. from our campground, it is just a 20 minute ferry ride to the heart of the city so very convenient and we save a lot of money.
Thursday we got to the campgrounds after a long bus ride, dropped our stuff off, and took the ferry to Venice around 4:30. Venice doesn't have roads or cars, just little streets, lots of little bridges and canals with little boats. the canals and boats replace the streets and cars of a normal city. Venice is kind of like Manhattan where the city is 5'6 islands connected by bridges. it is so weird how everything seems to be gloating, there are even floating cranes and floating power lines in the rivers. our first day there we just walked around Venice, taking in all the sights. all the streets are so narrow that every now and then open up onto plazas. we saw so many beautiful shops filled with hand blown glass jewelery, vases, and the most amazing Venetian masks. we walked to the main plaza of Venice where there is a gorgeous church, basilica, and prison. there was music playing in the square, people everywhere , the bridges and canals are so beautiful, and of course the gondolas are so romantic, definitely a must location to come to with your special someone. the last ferry back to out campsite is at 8:30 but by 7:00 all the shops were closed and everyone had gone to their homes/hotels. it was so weird/eerie walking through the little alleyways and canals at night with no one around, literally completely empty. we grabbed gelato of course on the way to the ferry and read in our little trailer for the rest of the evening. it was very weird how everything shut down so early.
Friday morning it was pouring. we stayed in our trailer till early afternoon hoping it would clear up. it was so cloudy we couldn't even see Venice from the docks of the campsite, whereas, yesterday we could see it clear as day. luckily, by the time we got to Venice it had stopped raining pretty much, although still cloudy and cold. we saw Peggy Guggenheim's house (founder of the Guggenheim museums across the world including the one we saw in Bilbao) which has been turned into an art exhibit of her own private collection. we tried to see the inside of the main church/basilica but it was closed so we walked around the outside (exquisite in itself) saw the Bridge of Sighs, and walked down the main shopping street that starts with a giant clocktower. walking around the shops with everyone on a Friday night was a lot of fun and so many beautiful things to look at. like last night though, by around 8:00, everyone had gone back to their houses/hotels, the shops had all closed, and the streets were almost completely empty as we walked back to the ferry.
this morning we head to Florence. camping was fine but it will be nice to stay in a hotel again in Florence, pronounced/spelled Fiernze in Italian. i am so excited to begin our tour of the Tuscany region of Italy.
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