A Spring of New Beginnings

I have to constantly remind myself that it is only February, even if every morning for the last few weeks I've walked across Bologna with clear blue skies and the temperature averaging above 50 degrees. The weather seems to reflect my mood-beautiful, almost care-free and happy! January and the first week of February could easily have never existed, and so they won't here but with a quick snapshot of my troubles.
-I had two exams, one that didn't take place because I wasn't told to sign up for a certain part of the test, and another that went amazingly well on Italian Literature...that I also studied for an average of 100 hours (in 10 days.)
-I will be getting two new roommates soon until the end of the semester (July), a friend from the program and Giulia, who is returning after spending some time abroad in an internship.

Now that my stressful weeks are over, travel fever has hit! The amazing weather and my new-found freedom created the spark that set off my renewed desire to see Italy while I still have the chance!

So I went, with a few good friends, to Chioggia. Chioggia is a small little port town just south of Venice, cute...but there wasn't much to do. We had an amazing lunch and wandered its empty streets until we arrived at the port. That's when we saw the sign for ferry rides to Venice...and that is when we, completely out of the blue and unanimously decided, to take a quick trip to Venice.



Venice was busy, beautiful, and even more amazing than my last visit. It could have been the absolute spontaneity of it all, or the great people I was with, or most likely, a bit of both. We took a waterbus around the city and made Saint Mark's Cathedral our first, and really only, stop and decided to make our way to the train station after a quite long search, and fruitless search, for a public bathroom. If I had to pick the exact moment when our troubles/drama began, it would be the moment a friend left on his own to find the bathroom. It went downhill from there...
After trying to find our way to the Rialto bridge, and to our friend, we became turned around and decided to just take the waterbus back to the station and that we would meet him there. After a few mishaps, we made it to the train station and literally sprinted to our platform to make our 6:57 train back to Bologna. We made it, but unfortunately our friend who bought the tickets before-hand, forgot to validate them, so I jumped off the train on our next stop outside of Venice to run to those ugly yellow boxes to stamp our tickets, and luckily jumped back on the train before the doors closed (yes, I know it was risky). It was so risky in fact, that my friend didn't make it back on the train.
Long story short, we had a movie-moment, as he likes to say, where we stared desperately at each other through the dirty train door windows after desperately pulling at the door handles, helpless as the train pulled away from the station.
He was able to get on the next fast train to Bologna, and actually beat us there by 10 minutes, and we returned home safe and sound.

Moral of the story: Spontaneity with great friends in amazing cities is great and fun until you start gambling with the Italian transportation system...in which case you will lose.

The End.