Italy Adventure day 1: Venice

Woke up at 9am today and began my last minute packing of bag for my trip. Brought my big backpack that i just bought before leaving for germany :D Cos I would be gone for 6 days, I needed to finish all my food so I had apples and sandwiches filled with many stuff! yumm :))

Went to library to print all the stuff we needed during the trip. Keaton, who was there with me, borrowed a thick 'lonelyplanet' tour guide for me. Though it was bulky, I thought that it would be useful for me to learn more about italy before exploring it, so i simply brought it along.

Met Haowen, took the bus to Koblenz, and another bus to Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. We were there at around 130pm but our flight was at 405pm. So we waited, had our yummy sandwiches, and waited somemore. Read up about Italy during the journeys...

Ad for Ryanair

We finally reached Venice city at 8pm and went looking for our hostel! Street signs in Italy were pasted on the buildings, which were not extremely obvious, and there were many many alleys and bridges in Venice, some leading to a dead end! So, of course, we were lost. haha. The two of us ended up in a dark alley, one holding an incomplete map of Venice while the other held a torchlight, and tried to locate ourselves... At this point, 2 chinese ladies came to our rescue! They showed us their map and we managed to find our way to the hostel! What was even better was that they gave us their map!!! :DD so nice and kind of them!

After settling down, we went to find FOOD. Venice, by the way, was FILLED with tourists. Especially those from Japan and Korea. Super tourist-y. The streets were like chinatown but narrower, filled with lights and roadside stalls selling venetian masks, etc. There were many snack bars which displayed delicious-looking pastries and candies in their shop windows and sold coffee and alcohols inside. Will show u the yummy-looking stuff the next entry.

It feels like Christmas!

Finally, we decided to eat at a restaurant which offers a tourist menu, which includes a 1st course (pasta), a 2nd course (meat), salad and free aperitifs. There were few customers and the staff were very friendly. They chatted with us, asked where we were from and how long we were staying. Since it was our first and last night in Venice, the staff actually invited us to go to a pub to drink and chill after dinner!

After our first course, the staff actually gave us a jug of red wine to drink! We were hesitant to drink it at first cos they didn't serve other customers red wine and we were afraid that we needed to pay for it! But they seemed so nice, wouldn't be out to cheat us ba! So we drank it. I drank most of it thinking that we could leave after finishing the jug but when our first jug was finished, they poured us another jug! Never-ending.... haha :S

Stayed at the restaurant for about 2.5 hrs, chatting with Haowen. Alcohol really helps you to open up to someone, i think. After much deliberation (we were quite tired from the red wine), we decided not to go to the pub with them! (we actually didn't mind going) and so we left. They didn't charge us for the red wine!

So tired even though we didn't do much. Tomorrow we'll see Venice in its full glory! :D