Dal Mio Punto di Vista: Carnevale in Venice

Hey all, I know it's been a few weeks since I last updated my blog, however it has been with good reason. I've been so busy lately, but I can't complain too much because I've been busy mostly traveling and relaxing as our semester break was a couple weeks ago.

The little adventure to Venice wasn't during our break though, it was the weekend before finals. Crazy one might say considering our debacle of a time there, but we wanted to be there for opening day and our travel plans for semester break wouldn't allow us the opportunity to go when we got out of school, so here en lies the story of our mini-vaca to Venice.

Seren and I went to Carnevale in Venice for a day. Now, when I say a day, I literally mean 24 hours and then some. We are a little crazy and I'll be it, broke. So, in order to save a significant amount of $$$ we took the 5 hour, 4:30a.m. train from Florence to Venice. The ride wasn't that bad once we got ON the train, you see, Seren forgot to set her alarm and woke up just in the nick of time for she and I to sprint to the station and jump on the train with literally one minute to spare.

Once we got there, we had such a great time. Everyone was dressed from head to toe in their Carnevale attire; masks, gowns, costumes, face make-up, full body paint, the whole thing. It was great. We walked around Venice seeing the sights and visiting every public bathroom we could find, and mind you they are a prized commodity in Italy since there are NO public restrooms. In effort to be prepared for our entire day's festivities she and I packed each a bag FULL of goodies: make-up, a smorgasbord of food, hairspray, hairbrushes, socks etc...pretty much anything your little imagination could muster up, we had it. I took a page out of my Abuelita's book and made sure I was prepared for anything or any act of God. Anyway, whenever and wherever we found the treasure of a public bathroom, we took the liberty to set up a beauty shop in each one, nevermind there were long lines of eager women waiting to probably do the same outside the door. People probably thought it was quite strange when two girls dressed exactly alike head to toe (we predetermined to wear the same exact outfit) entered the bathroom together. There was nothing we could do, we were there from 930a.m. and were going to be there until our train left at 3:11a.m. the next morning, so we needed to freshen up from time to time. Anyway, I'm pretty sure restaurants and bars will think twice about letting two girls dressed alike in glittery gold party dresses use their bathrooms for free.

We then proceeded to find this really cute bar on the coast of the port and sat for 4 hours drinking wine and rum and cokes. We made many friends, mostly guys who just wanted to harass us, would come sit at our table and talk themselves up like they were the kings of carnevale. It was fun to entertain their efforts though, Seren and I got a good laugh out of it. Italian men can be so ridiculous sometimes. A few drinks and a few hours later, we ended up participating in the opening ceremony parade and getting kebabs that we don't remember getting or paying for, for that matter. We found our way back to the train station after a more wild series of events, but nevertheless we were safe and back on the train. Not to mention however, how the train ride home, I was praying to the porcelain (gross plastic in this case) god of the train bathroom because I "luckily" encountered a bout of food poisoning. I don't know, maybe from the kebab. Anyway, we made it safely home around 7a.m. the following morning, all in all...it was a great time. The following pictures are the evidence:

I found some Italian smurfs