An AMAZING birthday weekend!
I can’t even tell you how great my weekend was… but I’ll try.
We decided to have my birthday dinner with the roomies on Thursday night since I was leaving at 4:30 am on Friday for Venice. I was expecting it just to be a low key evening not to different from any other night. However, my roommate Logan spoiled me rotten. She made me a huge dinner, bought me red daisies (my FAVORITE!), a big chocolate cake, and champagne. It was soo sweet of her. My other roommates were all there too, of course… except Diana who had already left to go to Milan for the weekend,
Dinner was great though. Absolutely delicious. Then we got ready to go out. I knew I couldn’t stay out late because of my early flight, but my roommates really wanted to take me out for a night on the town. We went to Campo dei Fiori and had an amazing time. We were there for a couple hours before I HAD to leave because it was 1:00 am. But so much fun.
I almost missed my flight to Venice because I was soo tired from only 2 hours of sleep, but luckily Nikki called me and woke me up just in time. Our flight was nothing special… and we got to Venice around 9:00 am. Before evening going into the city, we went straight to our hotel to wash up, eat, and take a nap. But after washing up and eating, we were so excited that we skipped the nap and took a bus into Venice right away. Almost immediately after getting off the bus, I saw a gondalo going doing the river and I literally skipped and ran up the stairs of the bridge to take pictures.
We didn’t have the absolute best weather, but for February I have no complaints. It was overcast and in the 50s… and it never rained. But seriously, Venice is beautiful. It looks just like all the pictures I have ever seen of it, but it is so much cooler to actually be there standing on a bridge over a canel. It was kind of surreal, actually, since I had been wanting to go there since I was 10.
Most of the day was pretty low key. We walked around for several hours taking pictures, spending time at San Marcos, grabbing some lunch, etc. San Marcos was awesome. And, just like every picture or movie you’ve ever seen of it, there are literally thousands of pigeons. I was pretending to kick one in a picture, and an old lady came up to me yelling in Italian, and then kicked me in the back! I couldn’t believe it! But it was kind of hilarious, so I just walked away laughing. By 2:00, our lack of sleep started to catch up with us so we went back to our hotel to take a nap and put on another layer of clothes.
After our much needed naps, we took a bus back into the city for my birthday dinner! We found this cute little place and ordered 3 meals to share, and a bottle of wine. Just a few minutes after ordering, this American guy came to ask us if we knew of any good bars or clubs in the area. We started talking to him and found out he was from Traverse City, MI! Since we knew we were going to be going out right after dinner, we invited him to join us since he was by himself. His name was Greg and he ended up being a really cool guy. In fact, he ordered two more bottles of wine on top of the one we already had, and then payed for our entire bill. We tried to stop him but he was determined… he kept saying, “It’s your birthday! I’ve got it!” It was very nice of him. After dinner, we went to a nearby pub to meet up with some other kinds from MSU, but all that wine started kicking in after about half an hour and we ended up calling it an early night. Well… early as in 1:00 am.
The next day we slept in til around 9:30, took showers, ate our wonderful continental breakfast, and headed back out to Venice. Greg called us and we met up with him at the bus station and he spent the whole day with us.
We went to Murano first, which is the island that is famous for glass blowing. We walked around a lot of glass shops which had beautiful jewelry, vases, figurines… everything you can imagine. We even got to go into a factory to see the process of glass blowing. It was pretty interesting.
Next was lunch, and then we walked around some more. I know all that walking doesn’t some like very much fun, but in Venice I just couldn’t get enough of it. Right after lunch it started to get sunny, too, which made everything look even more beautiful.
Since Saturday was the beginning of huge festival for Carnivale (same idea as our Marti Gras), there were tons of things going on around Venice. There were dancing acts, live music, people getting masks painted on their faces, and everyone was walking around in costume. Jaci, Nikki, and I all bought carnivale masks to wear around for the day, and to also have as souvineers. We saw a few more cathedrals, and then headed back to San Marcos where there was a huge stage set up for the opening ceremony/show. About 30 people dressed up from head to toe came out on stage and did masquerade dancing… waltzes and such. There were probably 4 or 5 thousand people in San Marcos Square watching the show. After about 30 minutes of dancing, the people from the stage came and grabbed people from the audience to dance with. I was so close to the front that when I put my hand up to go out there, they saw me and pulled me out to the stage. They spend about 20 seconds teaching us one of the waltzes, and then the music started and we had to start dancing. It was SOO much fun. I couldn’t even believe I was there in Venice, dancing at the stage for the opening ceremony of Carnivale! I learned the dance pretty quickly, but since there were about 20 volunteers, and 20 of the “professionals,” things got chaotic and everyone was running into eachother. The dance probably went on for about 20 minutes… and I was smiling and laughing the entire time. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Seriously. =)
As soon as I went back into the crowd, we had to leave to catch our train. We said our goodbye to Greg and then started speed walking to the train station. Halfway there, it started to rain. I guess we have pretty good timing, because it would have been miserable to be outside in Venice all night with it raining like that. We got to the train station with about 20 minutes to spare, grabbed some dinner, and then got onto the train. It only took two hours because we were just going to Bologna where we had a two hour layover and then got on another train to Rome. We met this Italian guy named Claudio who was going to Florence that night to see his girlfriend. He spoke to us the whole time in English, and every word that came out of that boy’s mouth was hilarious. It made that 2 hour ride fly by.
The night train from Bologna to Rome sucked, but it was cheap… we got back to Rome around 5:00 am and I couldn’t have been happier to climb into my bed and sleep.
Last night, eight of us went out to dinner at my favorite resteraunt in Rome to celebrate Amanda and my birthdays. (Amanda’s brithday is Tuesday, so Sunday was halfway between the two.) It was delicious, and our waiter brought each of our desserts out with candles, dimmed the lights, and everyone sang happy birthday. After, half of the resteraunt clapped. It was pretty fun.
So that was pretty much my weekend. I have no complaints, because I had a ball. And now I’m 20 years old.
Lots of love,
Jess
