Next stop! Venice

The extreme hot weather, the expensive food, the sticky tourists... "pushed" us away from Rome... and we were already looking forward for our next stop. It was not in my initial list, but Amir and Rina insisted to stop by here. Again, with some modification to my 'masterplan', we made a small detour and found ourselves at Venice - the city of romance..?!

We took a nite train from Rome to Venice. Arrived at around 5.30am... (I dun hav the travel journal, so my time was relatively as what I could recall)... Hardly any sleep on the train. A shared coach with few two others and making it a very crampy ride. But the early morning scene in Venice was just breath taking... it was so peace and beautiful. Quite a number of backpackers hadn't wake up yet... it was like a scout jamboree right outside the train station, with people still snuggling inside their sleeping bag or on the cardboard. Definitely backpacker's friendly station.

Had quick breakfast of coffee and bread from the cafes. Bought the all day passes from the ticket counter... and we went off to explore venice. We only had one day to get the most out of this city. First thing that we need to do was to get ourselves 'lost'. "Its part of the fun when you travel to Venice." "What?!" I just couldn't get into the fact that they want me to loose my sense of direction and navigation... no matter how difficult the maze inside venice, I can surely found our way out... that' s what I thot when we started our little walking tour, without any proper map in this city of mazes and canals. I kept on making notes on the right and left turns that we took. Busy scrambling down the street names, while Aiman busy snapping away pictures and Rina and Amir with their ooohh... and aaahhh... the beauty of Venice... when suddenly I realized that there's no point of freaking too much of not knowing where to go... stop taking notes and just let your lazy feet took you around.

Surprisingly, after so many left and right turns, we managed to get ourselves to some interesting places and historical sites... not so bad after all and then we decided to head to St Marco where all the tourists gathered. Since I turned off my 'GPS' instinct, we even get ourselves 'LOST' while we were riding the water taxi. We ended up where all the Venicians and tourists gathered on Sunday morning... all of them wearing to their minimum... and looks like they were heading to the beach... "Nope! Turn around guys... wrong direction..." already our stomach grumbled and asked to be filled. Decided to bring them to a beautiful garden that Amir and I spotted on our way to Lido... again had our lunch at the garden park while watching these Italian kids showing off their skills on the 'tarzan swing' and rock climbing.

The rest of the day, we spent around the Marcos... before we had to head back to the train station. We had our dinner of Margarita Pizza and Ice Lemon Tea before boarding the train... headed to Villach, Austria.