Of cookies, Italy, and photos

Europe » Italy » Trentino Alto Adige » Trento
August 26th 2008

Published: August 26th 2008

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I Get High On Mountains

I has a feather

Statue on the Citadella fortress in Budapest. Well, in Buda.

Yay, photos! A whole bunch of them!

Anyways. Monday made my head whirl.

First there was a train ride to the Italy/Slovenia border, which was mostly interesting because of the weather. When I left the hostel it was cloudy and foggy and cold; 6 minutes of tunnel later it was blazing hot and sunny on the other side of the mountain without a cloud in sight.

Then I changed trains in the border town of Nova Gorica / Gorizia. I felt bad at this point, since I didn't have time to find a Slovenian cookie. Most of 6 days in that country without a cookie! It's a sin. I soon arrived in Venice, and tried to make up for it.

Venice is amazing, and Venice is a maze. Really. I spent only a few hours exploring the city on Monday, but I'd love to go back sometime. The way to really experience it seems to be to just go ahead and get lost, since that's what will happen in the end anyways. There are canals everywhere, but most of the town is accessible if you can find the bridges. There are narrow streets and alleys everywhere, which

I has a torch!

I has a dragon. (Same place. The feather lady is on top of the big column on the right.

twist and turn and never end up where you expect them to. It's also a fairly big city, so you can walk a long time and only see a small part of it, like I did. Maybe it's just the kid in me speaking, but Venice would make a really good place to host a massive game of laser tag or paintball.

But back to the cookies. There are countless bakery-cookie shops along the main streets in Venice. I actually did try to count, but eating that many cookies made me lose track. And they were pretty good cookies, too! Lots of different tastes available, and everything from bite-sized to mini-cake. Needless to say, I have already sampled many Italian cookies after being here only a couple days. Unfortunately I keep forgetting to take photos of them, so you'll have to take my word for it that the best one so far was a giant cake-like thing with all sorts of summer berries baked in and sprinkled on top. 8.5/10.

On a side note from cookies, there are at least two ice cream shops for every one bakery. It was really good ice cream, and while not dirt

Wheat Weavings

At the ye olde fashionede market in the Buda castle.

cheap it got piled on high. Yeah, yesterday was not exactly a healthy food day for me. Oops.

Back to Venice. After 4-odd hours of getting lost down narrow alleys and trying to find my way through crowds of tourists (who where also just as lost as I was), I hopped on a shuttle bus to a campground back on the mainland where I stayed the night. For some reason it was cheaper to use their pre set-up house tent thingies instead of set up my own tent, so I went with that and paid in blood to the mosquito bank.

Despite being half tempted to spend another day in Venice, I decided to carry on: my wallet was noticeably lighter after yesterday, and I was afraid I might not eat anything other than cookies and ice cream again. So I hopped on a train going north, and ended up in the city of Trento, in the southern part of the Dolomite mountains. Of course, mountains!

Trento is a nice city. It's off the usual tourist route, so it's far less crowded than Venice was. It has a compact city centre that dates back to Roman times,

This was a first

In Vienna now, the first Starbucks I've seen in Europe!

so there's some interesting old architecture and fortifications to explore. What is most interesting though is that many buildings here are painted. Not painted as in this one's green, that one's yellow; painted as in murals. At random, all over the place. There's a big castle that I partly explored before they closed for the day and kicked me out, and it's full of painted walls too. There is one series of rooms lined with portraits of every bishop in the area since the 1200s.

And that's where I am now. Tomorrow I'll be heading up to a smaller town higher in the mountains to do some more hiking, so it may be a few days before the next update depending on where I stay.

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