October 23 , 2003 - page 3


Yet another wonderful thing about Italy is the food. Ahhh, the food. Every corner houses little pastry shops and gelaterias (ice cream shops). For lunch you can get a huge pizzone for four euros, which is about four dollars. Dinner is a little more expensive, but the pasta is definitely worth it. We also discovered that grocery stores in Venice are inexpensive. Needless to say, we bought a lot of toilet paper.

Masks are in every shop, and we found the specific shop that provided the masks for Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Street

performers gathered in every square and ranged from opera singers to mimes.

On the way back to England we did encounter a few more problems. Apparently, when we bought the bus ticket to take us into Venice, we were supposed to get a round trip ticket. We didn't know this, and since we had to catch the early 5:45am bus, the ticket station wasn't open. We were left with only one option: we needed to sneak onto the bus and hope we made it to the airport station.

This didn't go so well. The bus driver came around to punch the tickets, and when he came to us we obviously had nothing to give him. We tried to pay him (okay, so the word here is "bribe," but we were desperate), but he told us that we had to have tickets. However, our attempt to pay him off bought us enough time for the ticket booth to open, and he waited while we got our tickets.

When we got to the airport, customs was absolutely nuts. People were elbowing each other out of the way to get though first and, in general, there was no sense of order. When I went though there were some issues with my coat. Apparently, a metal hairpin had made its way through a hole in my coat pocket and into my coat lining.