Ciao! Long time no see. There were some technical difficulties yesterday with posting on the blog, so I didn’t really get a chance to blog about the engineer’s experiences in Venice over our free weekend! Nevertheless, I get to post it now!

So after our first week in Rome, the engineers got to decide if we wanted to travel to Assisi, Venice, or to just stay in Rome. I chose to ride with the crew who went to Venice, and if anyone actually gets a chance to go to Italy, I would highly recommend putting Venice on the top of your list.

Saturday morning, at 6 A.M. (which was a time I didn’t know actually existed), we began our trek to a train that would take us all the way from Rome to Venice! That in itself was a really cool experience because we got to actually enjoy some of the European public transportation that is available. The train system is a really slick and easy way to get around, even for those like us who can’t really read, write, speak, or understand Italian at all.

The trip itself took around 3.5 hours to get to our destination. Along the way there would be slight dozing, moderate increases in travel ‘selfies’, and a large increase on reading books of ‘Top 10 things to do whilst in Venice.’ As we arrived, what should have taken us no longer than a half hour to our hotel, took us about 2 hours to actually reach our destination. Of course, along the way, kebabs were an essential part to fuel our trek to our hotel.

So here we are (erm, were)! We found our hotel and now it was our obvious obligation to get lost within this small, quiet, and genuine city. The views were spectacular, the canals were winding, and the alleyways were very, very small. It really was what you imagine Venice would be like. Though I would personally would like to visit Venice in the future with probably a date of mine, visiting Venice with around 10 guys wasn’t really bad either.

What really surprised me was how tame the city was at night time. In Rome, at 7 O’clock, it seems like everyone is still hustling and bustling to get food, shop, visit sights, and so on. In Venice, at 7, it seemed like a ghost town. Like I probably could have dropped a pin and been able to hear it hit the ground. It truly added some charm to the city, and sort of gave it that genuine Italian feel to it. It was also a part of the day where I wasn’t getting bothered by street vendors trying to sell me ‘Selfie Sticks,’ so that was nice for a change. 

Some of us also visited the island of Murano! Murano has a history for glassblowing, and none of us have actually really seen glassblowing in person before, so we kind of felt like it was a necessary thing to do while we had the chance. It was a charming little province, with shops staggered every couple of paces that were selling some sort of glass blowing memorabilia. I personally broke off with a couple of guys to go explore the as much of the island as we could. In doing so, we came up to a small, hidden shop where a man was sitting, almost like waiting, for us to come in so he could put on a small demonstration of glass blowing. To be completely honest, it was one of the coolest things that I had ever seen. He literally took a molten blob of an amalgam of different types of sands and, within 30 seconds, made a horse that I would probably pay 30 Euro for. It truly is a remarkable talent that these glassblowers have, and it was such a treat to see it up close.

I will be uploading pictures later! The WiFi isn’t really working the way I want it to now, so I’m unable to actually get the pictures from my phone and put them on our hotel’s computer. But they’ll come soon, I promise! Venice really was such a treat.

-Alex Manning