Venice Stole my Heart - Part I

Here we go. The Europe Diaries. Part 1 of… I’m not sure…

The first stop on Mom and my European adventure was Venice. We flew out of Chicago around 6 pm on August 11^th, set to arrive in Venice around 3pm the next afternoon. The time change thing was weird… but not as weird as I thought it would be. I was surprised at how… normal I felt. I discovered that my body adapted to the time change because of my surroundings. My watch said 3pm when we landed, so 3pm is how I felt, even though it was really only 9am my time (and little monsters prevented adequate sleep on the plane overseas). 24 hours of traveling later, we were there, and we had the silliest grins on our face when we finally sat down and toasted our arrival.

Disclaimer: I do NOT remember every single restaurant we ate in… I wish I did, but I just don’t, sooo sorry.

Day 1

Besides proceeding to shriek every 5 seconds that we realized we’re in this gorgeous foreign land, we took 10,000 + steps worth of exploring, ate dinner at a quaint restaurant off the beaten path, and finished the day off in Piazza San Marco people watching, drinking Prosecco and daydreaming about the rest of our trip.

Day 2

We woke up bright and early (sans jet lag) to catch a water taxi to the island of Murano, known for the Murano glass factory that we were able to tour as a complimentary gift from our hotel (I’m guessing everyone gets this…), followed by a tour of the factory. Once we were back in Venice, we were STARVING and ready for some Prosecco, which we promptly realized we could buy from street vendors by the mini bottles for between 3 and 4 Euro (this in itself was an amazing discovery). Next up… PIZZA! We sought out a fairly priced restaurant where we could enjoy some bruschetta pizza and iced lemon tea (WARNING: bruschetta pizza in Italy simply means cheese pizza… we learned this the hard way). Once we refueled, we explored more in the one mile radius around our hotel, bought a selfie stick, broke the selfie stick, fixed the selfie stick, used the selfie stick, then ventured off to explore the Castello district of the Venice. We didn’t get very far before we realized we were not only lost, but we had lost sight of any and all tourists and appeared to be in the locals district. Not much to do there, so we moseyed back towards familiar territory for dinner, more wine, more shopping and a little FaceTime session with Courtney in the Square before finishing the night off with gelato (pistachio and Nutella… nom nom!).