Venice and Florence

Our first day in Venice had beautiful weather. We were still pretty exhausted from our four days of Paris mayhem, but we decided to go out and enjoy the sunshine. The city was so beautiful! We spent most of our afternoon at the Piazza San Marco and the surrounding area. There were street vendors, flashy boats, and lots of food. We got pizza for lunch - seeing as we were finally in Italy, it seemed like the right thing to do. Turns out, food in Venice is really salty! Not only do they use cured meats (lots of salt), but the guy that made it added more salt to the top of the slice before giving it to us. It wasn't our favorite meal, and slightly disappointing. We decided to try a panini for dinner, thinking that was a safe enough meal choice. We ordered a panini with bacon. When we ordered it, the man started cutting off slices of bacon that didn't look cooked. We were thinking that he was going to grill it up just for us. Then he stuck it on the bread, finished the sandwich, and handed it to us. We were a little confused. The shop was definitely a meat shop, but we didn't think we would have to cook the sandwich ourselves. Kendra asked the man if we needed to cook it and he seemed annoyed and told us that the meat was already cured - oops.

As we woke up the next morning, we got off to an early start and about midmorning the rain started pouring. We were drenched to the bone within 10 minutes. So we headed back to the hotel and spent the day relaxing, reading, and drying off in our room. It was definitely the perfect day to be in a hotel instead of a hostel.

We tried to leave to Florence early, but woke up late because we both had accidently set our watches for pm instead of am. But it turned out to be the best mistake we made the whole trip. The early train we were supposed to take was an express train that we didn't know required a reservation. If we would have gotten on that train, we would have been fined €40! Definitely not in our spending limit. So the later train we took instead was included in our eurail without reservation fees.

Upon arrival in Florence, we had a difficult time finding our hostel. Most of the hostels we have stayed in until now were pretty obvious with big signs. This one turned out to be a small hostel that just looked like apartments. The only sign was on the call button. They said it would cost us €25 a night, but we were able to talk them down to €17 - awesome! The next day we went sightseeing in Florence, where the rain caught up with us again :( Instead of just staying in, we weathered the storm and came back to the hostel pretty drenched, but happy we were able to see everything. Our original plan had been to stay in Florence another night, but because of the rain, we decided to move on to the Cinque Terre early - best decision ever!