Venice & Treviso

From Milan we traveled to Treviso, which is a 30 min train ride from Venice and is on the mainland. We stayed with an Italian woman named Susanna who was renting out a room. She kindly met us at the train station and drove us to her home. She lives right on a river that you could follow for about 20 min and make it into town. The first night we arrived we walked the opposite way along the river and encountered numerous water creatures: ducks, white swans, a black swan, and some sort of muskrat-type animal.

The first day there we took the train to Venice in the morning. We actually just barely made the train. We ended up not looking at the bus schedule and missing the bus to town, so we had to walk. It took a bit longer than expected and we were running to get on the train by the end of it.

 I had heard that Venice was a very touristy city, and it certainly was. I liked the city a lot though. Of course it would have been nicer if there weren't so many tourists but it was beautiful all the same. There weren't as many canals as I thought there would be. There were more maze-like streets. It would be very, very easy to get lost there. Sara and I did a pretty good job of not doing so. Venice was the first place we discovered you have to pay to use the bathroom. This has been one thing I do not understand about Europe. We paid 1.50 euros to use the bathroom there!

Mini Rant: Shouldn't using the bathroom be a right? I mean, it's something that everyone has to do; we have no choice. It's a physical need. A similar argument-shouldn't water be a right? Now this one gets messy. But I've noticed places in Europe where they will not give you tap water if you ask for it. I'll save these arguments for another day though.

When we got home that day we took a nap and then  went for pizza at a place right down the road from Susanna's house. She forgot to warn us that they do not speak English there though. Sara had a phrase book but we didn't bring it with us so we had to rely on our knowledge of  Spanish to converse with the waitress. The waitress was very, very nice and did a good job of communicating with us (thus we felt it was right to give her a tip). The pizza was very good, one of the best I had on the trip. I got something with salami or ham and Sara got ricotta and spinach. Yum Yum.

The next day was Sunday which kind of screwed up our plans. I forget that everything is closed on Sundays. There was a small window when the grocery store was open and we made sure to go there since we had a long train ride in the afternoon. Then, we walked around town for a bit til our train. We found a place that was open and bought our first cannolis.

Our train to one of the connecting stations ended up being 30 min late! Thus, we had to run to the next train and just barely made it. The ride to Lucca was very pretty-lots of hilly land and houses dotting the hills.