Day 17

---

We started our day a little slow today because we had to take a short train ride to Venice today. Since, as most people know, Venice is pretty much an island, the train actually rode on a bridge to where we had to get off on the island. The hotel where we were staying was not located on the main island so we had to take a vaporetti (water bus: ie boat with lots of seats). Once we figured out how we actually got on these boats we finally found our way to our hotel. Upon arrival we soon found out that they had overbooked our hotel and they would be moving us to a different hotel which was a part of their chain of hotels. Instead of having to take the bus all the way back to where we started, they had an employee of the hotel come pick us up in a car for free. It was actually quite nice after a long day of traveling. He even opened the doors of the car for us and refused to walk through a door before us, which actually made it quite hard to squeeze past him with our huge packs on. As it turns out, the hotel that we were moved to was actually better than our initial place since it was closer to the vaporetti station. We soon found out that the only room available in our new hotel was a 'small room' as he said. Having no idea how small the room would actually be and being promised that we could change rooms the following day, we accepted the room. Once we opened the door to the room we suddenly understood why he called it a small room. The room consisted of a decent queen sized bed in the middle of a room that left about a foot of space surrounding it. The bathroom was about the size of a small closet. We had a good laugh at the size of our cozy little room. Especially since when we opened the blinds in our room we discovered a shared balcony that was twice the size of our room! Since it was already starting to get dark and we were both tired from traveling all day we found dinner down the road at a little restaurant. Both of us got spaghetti since we both had a craving for it. On the walk home we bought a travel 'Guess Who' game and a deck of cards so that we could entertain ourselves a bit more during our travels. We also stopped off at a market where we wanted to buy some bread and cheese since we discoved that our room had a small refrigerator. I was pretty pleased with myself because the woman who worked at the deli didn't speak any Italian but we wanted to make sure that we bought cheese that wasn't too strong. I was pleased with myself because I drew on my music training and remembered that cresendo meant strong not growing louder. So Jo and I mimed our way through saying 'not cresendo'. In the end we got the bread and cheese that we wanted. We finished our night by playing Guess Who and watching Italian TV until bed time.

---