Blogger. So, another post mailed in...
Anyways, I'm at the airport right now, waiting for my
flight back to Galway. I've got about 4 hours to
kill, so I thought I'd kill one of them here.
On the bus on the way from Venice to the airport, I
started flipping through my pictures. The ones I took
in Rome seem like such an incredibly long time ago, I
can't believe it was only a week and a half.
Galway, too, seems quite distant at the moment. It'll
be strange arriving "home" there later tonight.
One of small frustrations about travelling has been
that my favorite things to post are the short
vignettes about particular thoughts or experiences.
Its the little things, really, that make travels
interesting. But my time online has been so limited
and I've felt the need to provide the 'big picture'
details in order to put everything in a frame of
reference, so a lot of those great little posts and
stories that I composed in my head while wandering
about this town or that were skipped or forgotten.
Hopefully, several of them will come back to me over
the next couple of days.
Here's a couple quick thoughts on Venice though, while
they're fresh...
First off, its one of the few places I've been that
has turned out to be more or less exactly as I
expected it. You've all seen it in movies,
commercials, etc. They don't pick a few key
highlights to loop over and over... that's really what
the whole town is like. It's cool, and yet, at the
same time, after a day or two, it gets somewhat
repetitive.
Venice is also without a doubt, the most difficult and
confusing city I've ever tried to navigate. One of
the top things the guidebook suggested was to just get
lost in the city.
Fortunately, that's one of the easiest things to do in
Venice, particularly when you have a map that only
occassionally represents reality.
Also fortunately, you really can't go wrong in doing
so. It's an island, and a rather small one at that,
and at least during daylight, I really don't think
there were any areas you wouldn't feel safe wandering.
I did find myself in some awfully quiet streets on my
way back from dinner last night, but eventually found
the main flow of traffic once again.
Here's a random thought... For a tiny, isolated
tourist town, Venice has an extremely disproportionate
number of toy and hobby shops! And not just
traditionally crafty souvenier toys, but full-out
action figure/collectible type places, with a small,
but diverse selection of model kits, including many
premium brand stuff that you would only find in the
increasingly rare hardcore hobby shops back home. In
fact, I really had to struggle and reason with
temptation when, in one shop, I found a Trumpeter kit
of the John W. Brown--the WWII Liberty Ship upon which
I sailed with my grandparents several years ago when
it was touring the Great Lakes.
My next update will be from back in Ireland, and I'll
get my pictures up over the next few days. There's
over 500 of them, so I'll have to pick and choose and
slim down the list a bit.
Now on to planning my next side trip.
Scotland/England/Wales with Justin G in June? Or will
I fit something else in first? France? Poland?
Amsterdam??
I've got 17 minutes left. Let's see what Ryan Air has
available in the next few weeks..........
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
No comments:
Post a Comment