Venizia - Carnevale

On Friday Feb 9, Nicole and I, along with about 55 other SACI students, took a bus to Venice for Carnevale. We were there until Sunday evening. Carnevale is basically a time of celebration in Italy. It is the last time people have do crazy things, feast and what not before Lent and Easter. I think it ends 40 days before Easter...not sure though. It's celebrated everywhere, but Venice is the popular place to go to see Carnevale festivities. It was fun and interesting and frustrating (mostly because the TAs were disorganized and they were late getting back to the bus so we didnt leave Venice on Saturday night to get back to the hotel until 2am). And because no one was told until we got on the bus that the rooms were mostly triples, a few people were randomly placed. So Neal ended up in my room with me and Nicole. It turned out rather fun though, and the 3 of us did stuff together. Here are my thoughts:
Pros:
-lots of fun, walked around a ton. On SAturday we went to the Accademia and saw all those Venitian painters and what not - it was all to religious for me though, I got bored after a while.
-tasty food
-lots of colours, crazy outfits and masks (some were rather cheap looking but some were AMAZINGLY crafted and were hella expensive ..I'm talking up to 300 Euro).
-um...what else? the gondola people were funny... they would be standing around in their striped shirts and funny hats and yell "gondola gondale" (translated: gondola, gondolas). we were walking around looking for a place to sit down and take a break, and this gondolier was tying up his gondola and climbing over the fence to the path and as I walked passed him he started singing. Hehe, we got a laugh out of it.
-When the sun was out, for the few hours that it made an appearance between Saturday and Sunday, Venice was nice, becuase it wasn't unbearably cold in the shade and we weren't walking all wet everywhere with loads of people around us.
-I got a few Venitian glass jewelry pieces. Man, I practiced some serious self control. Haha. Everywhere I went there were temptations. We also found this small hidden mask shop somewhere further away from all the touristy areas. We walked in and saw the artist who runs the shop and also has her workshop next door. She had a table where she was working on some masks, adding paint and details etc. So we got genuine Venitian masks, for a decent price, and they were different from what you'd get in the touristy areas or from street stalls.
-the place we had lunch on Sunday was very yummy.

Cons:
-EXTREMELY TOURISTY. There were way too many tourists. It seemed like there weren't an local people around unles they worked in a shop. And the few Italians mostly came from outside of Venice. Apparently a lot of people don't realy live in Venice, but outside of it and commute in for work or whatever. So the whole place gave me a Disneyworld kind of feel...even though I've never been to Disney, it's one of those places everyone goes to but no-one lives there. It's where EVERYTHING is overpriced (a can of coke = 4.50 euro!)
-weather was mostly AWFUL - was rainy and overcast 85% of the time we were there.
-Hotel had no hotwater :(
-too many drunk people everywhere not looking where they were walking.

Anyway, here are some pictures:



Near Piazza Romana


Feed the birds...(soo many pigeons! it was insane!! one landed on Neal's shoulder and sat there for a few minutes then flew off)




crazy Italian hippies singing and dancing away. it was fun to watch though.


some church, dont know the name of it.







Nicole and I with our masks.