This past weekend, I went to Venice for Carnevale (which is basically the original Mardi Gras). It was RIDICULOUS. But mostly just really cold.
My trip started out with a few complications: I had to find a way to get to the Charles de Gaulle airport and then from the Venice airport to the hostel all by myself. It was a crazy day and I ended up taking all four types of transportation: I took the Paris métro to a central stop where I took a bus to the airport, from there a plane to Venice Marco Polo (haha that’s the name of their main airport) and then the Venice Vaperetto (or bus boat) to the hostel. It was quite the experience but kind of exciting, especially since I had to do it alone. Luckily, my sense of direction has gotten better and I did a ridiculous amount of research before leaving. And then of course the entire time I had to stop myself from thinking about the movie Taken…. But it turned out fine and I made it! Oh the best part! I helped this elderly French couple that was next to me on the plane find their way to the city center (San Marco square). I gave them directions and showed them how to buy tickets for the buses and water taxi, all in French too! They were adorable!
At the hostel, I met up with friends studying in Florence through NYU. It was pretty nice.. pretty standard for a hostel. My only complaint was that there was no heater and it was like 17 degrees outside all weekend. We had to sleep with 6 sheets, a blanket and in our winter coats but I guess you get what you pay for. It didn’t matter much though, we were barely ever in the hostel. The first day it was already pretty late so we took the Vaporetto to the city center and wandered around. Venice is pretty small but really beautiful! The next day, the Carnevale festivities began! We bought masks and wandered around and took pictures with drunk people in full costumes and visited the Guggenheim Museum (Venice edition) with two French boys we met staying at the hostel. The best part of the day though was going to this Italian shoe store. We made friends with the guys working there and they invited us to this party they were throwing at the store where they handed out free Bellinis (a peach flavored champagne drink invented in Venice). It was so funny! We spent like 3 hours there while a professional photographer took pictures of all of us in masks and drinking Bellinis. We’re probably going to end up on some website promoting the store or something. We asked one of the guys to recommend a place for us to go out at night (Venice doesn’t have much of a nightlife and we didn’t have any luck the night before) and he disappeared for a while and came back with a post-it that had the name of a restaurant and his name on it. He told us to go to the restaurant say his name and that we’d be taken to VIP room with a club. So random. We get there, have the most amazing meal and get taken through some velvet curtains up some shady stairs to a club where we were very underdressed and under-drunk. Probably one of the strangest experiences of my life, but a fun story to tell!
On the last day, we rode a gondola, took pictures on the Rialto bridge (the famous one that they recreated at the Venetian) and had one last meal: authentic Italian pizza! Then probably one of the most exciting moments of the trip: we sprinted through the entire city to get back to the bus-boat to make the last one so we could make our flight. It sounds strange but running through a sea of masked, drunken Europeans with insanely loud music playing in the background was just a ridiculous amount of fun. I’ll probably never forget the feeling. We ended up just making it and got on our flight.
The three things I will take away from this trip:
The next time I go to Venice, I’m going in the summer. My authentic made-in-Italy Carnevale mask. Bellinis.
