Italy

Meghan writes...

We left for Venice on the 4th of December. We had a good train trip, quite unlike the one back from Nice. Venice is quite amazing. There are canals there, but also streets. Our apartment was right beside a canal. If you fall out the window, you are in the water. They have about five latches on that window. We had a good time trying to tell the lady that stays upstairs (who only speaks Italian!) that we were staying three nights.

We found out the next day that Italians do not do pastries as well as the French. What we had after supper was three “cookies” that were shaped like mini cakes and were almost as hard as rocks. One of them was green. Despite that, we did have a good stay in Venice. There is lots of glass-blowing there, particularly on the island of Murano. We went there on the 6th by vapporetto. There are also lots of cats there; we saw four or five within about two hours.

The day after we went to Murano, we left Venice to go to Rome. Rome is just as amazing as Venice. (Although I like Venice better). I find it amazing that all those people are living in a city with so many very old buildings. We just had to walk about five or six blocks and we were at the Minerva Temple. We also saw the Coliseum. It is HUGE! We went inside it too. Beside it there are some ruins that they dug up from the ground. They are called the "Ludus Magnus". They are ruins of where the gladiators trained. There is also a secret passage from there to the Coliseum so that the gladiators were not seen in the street.

So, over all, we had a nice trip in Italy. We stayed three nights in Venice and four in Rome. On the way back we took an overnight train. That was fun. Cameron and I slept on the top bunks of the Couchettes. I was a little worried about falling off because there was nothing there to stop us. (Or so we thought). So I put shoes under my mattress on one side. I actually had a good sleep. The next morning we found some fence-type things to stop us from falling off the beds.

We were glad to see our apartment when we got back, after being gone for over a week.