October 23, 2003

Ahh, Venice.

The highlight of this week was a trip to Venice. A large group of us decided that the best place to be on a weekend was Italy, and so that's exactly what we did. However, the amount of travel we had to do on the first day was more than we had expected. We needed to take a train from Reading to Paddington station. From there we needed to go through the tube system to reach the Standstead Express, which would take us to the airport. The flight itself was a mere two hours, but with all the other traveling we did we arrived in Italy at

11 p.m. This is actually where all the trouble starts.

Since none of us know Italian, we frantically tried to explain to the woman at the bus station that we needed to get to our hostel by 12:30 and how do we get there. She appeared to understand us but gave us the wrong directions. We then end up at another bus station at around 11:30, and we had apparently missed the bus that was supposed to take us to our hostel. In fact, there were no other busses that night and none of us had euros for a cab. Fortunately, there was one bus left that took us to another airport that was much closer to our hostel. With a little hunting and the help of an extremely nice Italian lady, we found an ATM machine and she called a cab. We couldn't actually use the phone since it was all automated and, obviously, in Italian.

When the cab driver pulled up and we told him our destination he started laughing uncontrollably. This doesn't give one the coziest of feelings. At 12:30 on the dot we arrived at our hostel, Alba D'oro. After seeing the hostel we conclude that Alba D'oro is Italian for 'Port-o-Pot,' and let me tell you why. Our rooms — there were two people to each room—were made out of the same material that port-o-pots are made out of and were about double the size of one. They were also bubble shaped: think of the pod from Mork and Mindy.