rosy ng

Venice, Paris and finally home

I've been home for 3 days now and so quickly a month has gone by. it got a little difficult to find internet cafes in Venice so I've missed a few emails but here I go.

Venice was great. Lots of people warned us about it potentially being a bit smelly with the Grand Canal but the people were wonderful and the food fantastic here. We rented a little apartment for the 4 of us to share as we leave our hostel days behind. We're right in the heart of Venice and a 10 minute walk from St. Mark's Square.

We did some of the touristy things like go to the Doge's Palace (the former Duke of Venice), getting attacked by pigeons in St. Mark's (I think there's a movie scene like that in The Day after Tomorrow...there's also a video of me screaming while pigeons swarmed me, I'll show you all later when I get my camera fixed). We also went on the ferry to tour the Grand Canal and visited the island of Murano (where we spent our life savings on handmade glass pieces and beads). For any museum/art lovers out there, my recommendation is definitely to visit the Peggy Guggenheim museum. That woman has spectacular taste in modern art and it’s set up so that you don’t need to have a masters in Art to enjoy it.

The food is incredible with Winston and I making a full supper out of some very adventurous looking cuttlefish and black mushy sauce. It doesn’t sound or even look very good but it tastes spectacular.

While in Venice, we got student tickets to a concerto done in traditional Venetian style (with costumes and the whole bit) in a church. It was a spur of the moment thing but it was so rewarding for Marg and I (Adrian and Winston fell asleep...boys!)

After 5 days in Venice, we took an overnight sleeper train to Paris. I've never been in a sleeper train so that was actually really fun. We had the compartment to ourselves it was very clean and unexpectedly modern and nice. Of course this was the Eurostar train so it's a bit nicer than trains that we bumped along around in Italy.

So after 4 years of having left Paris, I arrive back in my favorite city and back at a nice little hotel that I stayed in last time. The hotel is located in the Latin Quarter area of Paris so it’s surrounded by loads of fantastic and inexpensive restaraunt. It’s also with in 10 minutes walking distance from Notre Dame, which incidentally becomes an open arena for all kinds of performance art and street performances in the evening. The four of us took a liking to a gang of 4-8 stunt roller skaters that spend every evening launching themselves off homemade ramps (constructed from street signs, pallets from shops and fencing from road construction).

We bought a museum card while we where here and made plans to get to all the museums that we wanted to see. The whole thing about being in the heart of a big city is the number of distractions that you come to. The first day we attempted to go to the Louvre, we didn’t end up getting there until 1:00pm despite the fact that the museum was only 15minutes away from our hotel and we started at 9:00am. We ended up shopping and then having to take our bags back to the hotel and then shopping some more just on the street that took us to the Louvre. Between the 4 of us, we came home with 6 jackets, 1 odd looking puffy/furry vest (Winston), 5 pairs of shoes, 6 leather belts, 2 bags and a load of accessories just from Paris alone.

The great thing about going to Paris after being in Italy for so long is the food. Although the pasta that we had in Italy was amazing and heavenly, we were good and tired of the pasta. Paris is full of variety in food with some decent looking Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Lebanese and of course French restaurants. We had escargots almost every night and found ourselves dipping cubbed bread and meat in big pots of cheese and in my case beer (I’m just starting to like cheese so I haven’t upgraded to the big pot of melted cheese yet).

The last time I was in Paris, I didn’t go out to Versaille because I didn’t have much time so this time I made sure that we got a chance to go out there. The palace was beautiful and so enormous. Of course we had to squeeze our way around the massive groups of tourists to be able to see everything.

The trip was great and I had a fantastic time. I am truly glad to be home though – I think I’m getting old. We met lots of people from all over the world, some have been traveling for close to a year. I don’t know how they do it but it really is very nice to be home and have sushi!

posted by hikui @ 12:02 PM