Venezia

After Switzerland came Italy, we started the Italy leg of our trip with Venice.  We spent pretty much all of Sunday on trains from Lauterbrunnen to Venice.  Mind you this was the Sunday right before Christmas, so the trains were packed and the stations were absolute madhouses.  On our first train, lots of people had to stand for hours because all the seats were taken.  We arrived in Venice around 8 PM; long after the sun had gone down. Luckily we had our GPS. It took us nearly 45 minutes to reach our hotel by foot (*cough*, budget travellers) and it involved lots of twists and turns through alleyways and LOTS of bridges (all of which involve climbing stairs to cross). I'm 99% sure we NEVER would've found our hotel without that GPS! To add to the fun of walking around Venice with luggage, one of the wheels went out on our big suitcase, so poor Spencer dragged 50 pounds of luggage across Venice without the use of functioning wheels. Stay tuned to find out more about that issue. Our hotel in Venice was decent; the best part was the toilet, which was literally in the shower (see the picture near the bottom, you may even notice the soggy toilet paper because I forgot to take the TP out before I showered).

Our guidebook said that Venice does this slightly disappointing thing of being exactly what you expect it to be. This is kinda true, there really are canals everywhere with boats and gondolas and absolutely no cars (the streets are far too narrow). There are beautiful arched bridges everywhere. All the streets are made of stone, no cement or asphalt here! Many of the houses are brightly stuccoed with wooden shutters and flower boxes, and they hang their laundry to dry on lines zig zagging over the streets. The interesting thing about Venice is it has very few major "must-see sights"; you come to see Venice itself, as a city.

St. Mark's Square & Doge's Palace

The view from the Rialto Bridge, it was pretty foggy while we were here.

Monday we spent the day just wandering through the streets trying to "get lost" as all the guides suggest. We found some beautiful areas away from all the other tourists by doing this, and that's where we got some of our best pictures and saw where the locals live.  For lunch we got some street vendor pizza and gelato, which was way tastier than the “Italian food” we'd had the night before.  I put this in quotes because every sit-down meal we had in Venice was a sorry excuse for Italian food. 

Venice and its islands have an insane amount of churches: 149 to be exact.

Kids playing soccer

 Another interesting thing about Venice is it's a true island (which you probably know), but what you may not know is there are actually lots of other little islands in the area called the Venetian islands. So Tuesday, Christmas Eve, we (sort of) escaped the crowds and rode a waterbus to two of those Venetian islands. The first was the island of Murano. Murano is famous for their glass blowing, so we walked by tons of shops with all their trinkets on display. They had some really pretty vases and dishes, but they're pretty expensive and made of glass...so we didn’t think they’d make practical souvenirs. Maybe someday we'll go back when we're rich and we can just ship them home ;). After Murano, we went to an island called Burano. The people of Burano are famous for making lace and having brightly colored houses (we're talking lime green, fuchsia, and dandelion yellow). They say the houses were painted bright so the fishermen could find their home at the end of the day.  Now of course it's just to look pretty and suck in the tourists.  We wandered around, took some great pictures, ate our PB&J in the park, then headed back to our hotel for naps because we were going to be up late for midnight mass.

Some of the glass work in Murano, I wish we had better pictures of this.

Burano

I'm seriously in love with colorful houses.  I wish they were a thing in America.

Top: This strange group of people dressed in all black walked around singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve, they were really entertaining.  It was also a little funny to hear them sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas", I'll bet they don't get a lot of those.  Bottom: The Asians loved taking pictures of the pigeons, so I took a picture of the Asians taking pictures of pigeons....

By the time we went to get dinner, pretty much everything had closed down for Christmas Eve.  We found one shop that was open and bought a calzone to share.  We sat outside in one of the ten empty tables to eat it.  Before we could finish eating, the shop owner came out and told us we had not paid the "sit-down fee".  Then she clapped her hands and yelled “Ciao! Ciao!” at us like we were some pesky dogs.  We left with our tails between our legs.  The problem was we were still really hungry.  We walked to McDonalds to get some food and even that was closed! On our way back to the hotel, we found a little sit-down food restaurant that was open, and decided to eat there.  The restaurant was playing some classic, American Christmas music, had some cheap tinsel hanging around the shop, and the employees were wearing little Santa hats.  It felt like that scene in the Santa Clause when they burn the turkey and eat at Denny's.  When our dinner came out, it tasted pretty cheap and crappy.  To make matters worse, the bill was over $50!  They'd charged us $7.50 (5 Euros) per CAN of Coke…. and we both got one because they told us they didn’t have tap water!  We were pretty ticked when the bill came out.  After dinner, we went to St. Mark’s square to attend midnight mass in St. Marco’s Basilica.  It’s cool to say we attended mass in Venice, but we understood absolutely nothing from the service, so it didn’t put me in the Christmas mood like I’d hoped.

Dinner round 1: Our calzone for dinner (note all the closed shops behind Spen, this was normally a bustling street)

Dinner round 2: Doesn't that pasta just look gourmet? And check out those decorations ;)

The line for mass and some details from inside.  Apparently it's pretty rare to see the ceiling with lights on it.  The entire ceiling is made of little mosaic tiles! Crazy!

Venice was fabulous.  It was absolutely beautiful and was everything I’d envisioned.  There were two things that I really hated though.  First, I was sick of the people smoking everywhere!! I thought the people in London smoked like chimneys but it was NOTHING compared with the Italians!! It is pretty much inevitable you're going to walk behind smokers everywhere you go here. They smoke in the train stations, over their product in the market, and in the lobby of our hotel. Call me a Utahn, but there’s something about walking around in an endless stream of people, with cigarette smoke in every direction that starts to grind on your nerves.  The other highly obnoxious thing about Venice is the dogs. Everyone seems to have a dog, which is fine. The problem is there is no grass anywhere, and dogs have to poop. So, the dogs do it in the walkways. And the norm here is to pretend you don't see your dog doing it and keep walking. So we had to watch our step everywhere we went to avoid all the stupid puppy poo.  On that happy note, I’ll end this post.  Next time, Florence. 

Here's the picture of the toilet in the shower as promised.  You didn't believe me did you?

But really, Venice is awesome. 

On Top of the World

If you get anything from this post it will probably be this: The Swiss Alps are beautiful and Switzerland was one of the highlights of our trip! Spencer asked me about 17 times if we could move to Switzerland while we were there. He has also declared it the most beautiful place on Earth (but no big deal).  The real bummer about our visit to Switzerland was that we only had 2 days there.  It was the hardest part of our trip to plan (how do you narrow down a whole country to one place?), so it ended up getting the least amount of our time because we sort of gave up on planning it (lame, I know).  Our biggest regret is that we didn’t extend our time there and cut out a few days in Italy (Naples, maybe??). 

Riding trains is pretty fun!

Thursday we caught a train from Germany to Grindelwald. The journey took about 7 hours, so it ate up most of our day. It was fun to watch out the windows as we rose higher into the Alps, and to see all the little villages with their cottages and churches.  The worst part of the day was dragging our luggage up the icy hill, in the dark, to the hotel we couldn’t find.  Plus there were little rocks that kept getting caught in the wheels so the luggage wouldn’t roll.  I was a really happy camper for those 35 minutes ;).  That night we were supposed to be sleeping in a 16-man hostel room with bunk beds, but we got upgraded to a 2-man.  Still with bunk beds but certainly better.

 (Top left: A picture from inside the gondola, Top right: Giving you an idea of the poor visibility)

Friday morning we got up bright and early, walked into town, rented our ski and snowboard gear, and headed up to the ski resort.  We spent the whole day on the mountain, and survived ski day with no broken bones or concussions, but some really sore muscles.  We were hoping we'd get an awesome view of the Alps from the top of the ski lifts, but the clouds covered everything up. In fact, we spent most the day skiing through the clouds causing very low visibility, lots of snowflakes in our eyes, and difficulty perceiving what was snow ahead of us and what was sky.  We spent the day doing the "easy" runs because we didn't feel safe going too fast with our severely limited visibility. Doing the easy paths was fine with me though. The plus side of the bad weather was nobody else seemed as crazy or determined as us, so we had almost the entire mountain to ourselves with all the fresh, fluffy powder that fell throughout the day. 

Rosti for dinner - A traditional Swiss dish.  And yes, we did eat lots of Swiss chocolate here too ;)

That night we caught a train to one of the other mountain towns near Interlaken called Lauterbrunnen.  We had loaded the walking instructions to our hotel from Google Maps when we had Wi-Fi, and found the hotel was about a 30 minute walk from the train station.  This time we decided to catch a bus to our hotel rather than walk, but we had about an hour to kill until the next bus came.  So, we took our time getting dinner, then just sat at the bus stop.  While we were doing this, Spencer was fiddling with the GPS we’d brought.  He got it working just as we finally got on the bus.  As the bus was driving up the road, the GPS told us we were passing out hotel!  We looked out the window, and sure enough there was the Hotel Staubbach.  We pushed the button to get off, and hopped off at the next stop.  Turns out our hotel was actually about a 5 minute walk from town, so we sat in the cold for nothing.  Stupid Google Maps.  At this hotel, we got a budget room and were literally sleeping in the attic.  The funny thing is it was one of the nicest places we stayed!

Lauterbrunnen valley

Saturday, our hotel receptionist suggested we go hiking for the day. So, we rented hiking boots and took a ski lift up to the hiking trail.  Lauterbrunnen sits in a U-shaped valley between two sets of steep mountain cliffs.  The name Lauterbrunnen means “many springs” because of all the waterfalls that fall from the tops of the mountains into the valley.  To give you an idea of the place, JRR Tolkien created Rivendell based on Lauterbrunnen, so yeah it was pretty beautiful ;).  Sorry for the picture overload!

A little mountain train

Spencer drinking some crisp mountain water

One of the cabins in Gimmelwald

The Hotel Staubbach in Lauterbrunnen

The hike was only supposed to take a couple hours if you walked at a good pace, but we took our time taking pictures, soaking up the sun, and sitting on benches in awe of the mountains around us.  The final portion of our hike took us through a little Swiss village called Gimmelwald where the locals raise goats, the cows have bells around the necks, everyone makes their own cheese, and no cars are allowed in the village, even for the villagers! That day may be my favorite day we spent in Europe.  

 Top left: The Lauterbrunnen church was right outside our hotel, Top right: Staubbach falls

 I loved these Christmas lights in the church yard

Spencer took this picture in Interlaken while we were waiting for our train to Venice

Leaving on a Jet Plane

We visited the Warner Brothers Studios on a Monday.  On Tuesday, we finished packing up and cleaning our flat, travelled to the Stansted Airport, and caught a plane to Stuttgart, Germany. Overall, our journey to Germany was flawless.  We got to the airport with plenty of time, made it safely on the plane, and found our hotel without any trouble.  It took us 5 months, but we are finally professional travellers ;). 

 (A beautiful cathedral near our hotel)

The whole purpose of our going to Germany was to visit the German Christmas markets, which had been recommended to us many times.  So on Wednesday, we spent almost the entire day visiting two Christmas markets. The first one was a smaller market outside of Stuttgart in a town called Ludwigsburg. While we were there we had a bratwurst (we were in Germany after all) and a steamed bun with vanilla cream and cinnamon over it. The bun looked delicious but tasted mediocre. After the first market we went back to our hotel to put on some more layers, it was a lot colder there than London was. We both ended up with about 5-7 layers plus hats and gloves, but at least we were warmer!

The Stuttgart market was much cooler than the first one. It had a lot more stands with more variety. We spent several hours walking around looking at the 100s of booths. One of the coolest parts was the elaborate Christmas decorations on top of their booths and all the smells of Christmas almonds roasting. The one downer was that these markets were very similar to the two Christmas markets in London (which were based on these German markets), so it wasn't AS cool as it would have been if we'd never seen those before. Overall, we still had a good time and now we can say we've been to Germany.

A model city with train tracks around it

Hand carved and painted toys were a specialty item

We had to get our German pretzel at the end of the night! One of our favorite parts of visiting Europe at Christmas time was seeing all the nativities.