train strike

Yesterday my roommate, Scott, and I woke up and began walking to the train station after some hotel breakfast. We knew the general direction, and started taking off. Deciding it was probably far, we hopped on a bus going the same way to snag a ride. The bus was packed and we didn't know much about the bus so we just kind of hopped on. After riding for about 10 minutes I noticed a sign suggesting that if you didn't have your ticket when you got on, you should give the drive 2 euros, exact change immediately. We quickly got off and walked for 45 minutes the rest of the way to the train station through the city. (It's much farther than we thought it would be).

We got to the station and met up with folks from the trip to head to Venice for the day. We were about to purchase tickets when all of the ticket buying windows closed. Odd huh? But no worries, I saw two Italian girls use the automatic ticket machine yesterday, so we headed over to it and used that for our tickets. Once we all had our tickets, we waited for a while and thought it was odd the trains weren't moving. Also it was odd that next to all of them on the screen was SOP, which evidently indicates that the trains were on strike. Or at least the workers were. After standing around confused for a while, we finally learn that they're striking until about 2pm.

We head back into Vicenza and explore the city a bit and goto a big Theatre. We also sample the gelato and have a bit of lunch. Finally we make it back to the train station and use our ticket from earlier to make it to Venice.

It's very easy to get lost in Venice. The first thing our professor does is shows us the signs that are spread our that indicate the direction to walk to get to the Rialto bridge, Saint Mark's Basilica, and the train station. We walk to the bridge which is very nice. The walk there was fun and we got to see some of Venice. The bridge is very nice and we talk for a while about the structure of the bridge (weight bearingness and other fun engineering perspectives on it), and we talk about the space of it (get the architectural aspect of the class).

Next we walk to Saint Mark's Basilica. It was beautiful. Finally we talk about the space of it and the surrounding area in Saint Mark's square, and then our professor bids us a farewell, a good luck finding the train station, and a see you tomorrow morning. My group of three wanders through Venice for the evening, stopping for a spot of pizza, and then we make it back to the train station.

Armed with a good map of Vicenza, we walk back to the hotel which only took about an hour or so. We did stop for 10 minutes while Stephen and I climbed a huge set of stairs behind an arc to go up to a hillside that overlooks the city.

Today we are heading back to Venice to look at more buildings. I'm looking forward to it!

And I'm trying to post pictures but the wireless in the hotel is a bit sketchy. I might update this post later, otherwise you'll just have to imagine.