Padova & Venezia

Last weekend I traveled to Padua and Venice with my program! It seemed like the longest weekend ever even though we were only gone from Saturday to Sunday. I had a hard time packing because it was forecasted to rain all weekend long and I didn’t want to wear my boots and ruin them, so I chose to wear sneakers. Also, my raincoat isn’t that warm so I had to wear a lot of layers under it.

We left Saturday morning at 8:30 and I mistakenly led my roomies to the wrong bus stop..oops! Two busses meet at one place and the other two meet at another. Luckily, they let us on one of the busses because there was room. It took about 3 hours to get to this little organic farm in Padua (Padova in Italian) for our first stop. It wasn’t raining out just extremely gross like foggy, cloudy and humid. We couldn’t walk too far into the farm because it had been raining all week and the ground was disgusting, but we did get to see some cows and chickens. They all smelled so bad EW! Then we went inside and had a homemade organic meal fresh from the farm! The first course was pasta with a meat sauce that was really amazing! Then they gave us fresh cheeses, sausage and polenta (a Padovian specialty), and then finally homemade cookies and cake! Lunch was great and then we got back on the bus to head to the center of town for a tour. The tour was really interesting and we learned about how Galileo studied at the University of Padua, which is where he discovered the Milky Way. We also went into the Basilica of Saint Anthony where there was sooo much old stuff. We couldn’t take pictures inside the church and that was kind of annoying. Inside the church there was a statue of the first female graduate ever from Univ of Padua. That night we went out to dinner with a big group and had a lot of fun then went out to this bar where like all of our program was so I got to meet a lot of new people.

Galileo (with a bird on his head)

The next day we woke up early and drove an hour to Venice. The city is made of 118 islands with 400 bridges WOW! We parked our bus and then had to take a 30 minute water taxi to the main island and saw the BEST views of Venice. We got off the boat and met for a tour where we saw the majority of the city. It was cold and wet and I was starving the whole time so right after the tour we ate lunch! Then went shopping. I got some Murano glass that is made only in Venice and then we just window shopped and walked around the rest of the day. Venice was extremely beautiful but I feel like all my pictures came out bad because the sky was gray and gloomy.

Finally this coming weekend I’m staying in Florence! It’ll be my first weekend in over a month here and I can’t wait to have so much more time to explore. We plan on climbing the over 400 stairs to the top of the Duomo tomorrow!