The cities I would have never have seen...

Well... I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I have figured out a way to be able to put pictures into my blogs!! The good news is my friend Nyree has a camera with a cord to get pictures onto my computer. So I just took my memory chip out of my camera and popped it into hers and then I was able to download my pictures onto my laptop!! So yaaaay the pictures are on my laptop so I can in theory get them into my blog! The bad news is... I had to pay for the Wifi I'm using tonight... it was 4 Euro for an hour... which kind of sucks but I'm in the middle of nowhere, and even if I found a place that did have free wifi I'd still have to buy a drink... so it kind of evens out... BUT the wifi I paid for here SUCKS! It doesn't work and it moves really really slow... And I had to sign my life away to get it. Apparently, it's the Italian law that a copy of my passport has to be made and kept on file and that everything I do will and is being monitored on here. It's an anti-terroism thing I guess. Stupid big brother societies... I'm not doing anything wrong, but I still don't like being watched. This world is crazy now a days. But moving on... the internet is so bad that I can't even upload pictures onto here because it moves too slow. :( Sooo that sucks, but once I get a good internet connection somewhere I'll post a bunch of them up.

The past couple days have been really intense and a lot of fun!! A few days ago we went to Lugao in Switzerland which was a beautiful relaxing place. We were only there for a couple of hours, but it was very pretty and was nice to see. Then finally we made it into Italy! Yay!! I've really liked Italy so far!

The first city that we went to was the famous Verona... which is where Romeo and Juliet was set. Did you know that Romeo and Juliet were actually based off of the life a real couple? One family supported the king, and the other supported the pope. They actually have the graves of both Romeo and Juliet in Verona... they are on the outskirts though and I didn't actually get to make it out to see them. BUT I did get to go to Juliet's house and see her famous balcony. I also rubbed her statue's right breast for good fertility!! Everyone was lining up to do it, and I have the picture of it! So I jumped up and did it as well :) When we walked off of the road there is a walkway that is filled with declarations of love. You can see that people have written that they were there and were in love with each other over every single inch of this area... and then when they ran out of room on the walls they started pinning up notes, and there are tons and tons of them all over the place!! I will post the pictures in a couple of days! I don't know if I'm going to have internet in Rome or not, but I'll be super busy and doing a lot in room... so I don't know if I'll be able to sneak on or not... But Verona was a nice city to stop in at. I got to try real gelato there which was AMAZING!! I had banana flavored it was very yummy!!

I also go to go to Venice! Venice is called the "Wet City" for numerous reasons... I have to say that Venice is unlike ANY of place that I've ever been to... For one thing Venice is a series of 180 islands, and it doesn't have any roads in the entire city... it is all canals and water... and it has bridges connecting the islands. It was incredibly hard to get into Venice. We had to take a 20 minute bus ride and then a 45 minute boat ride to get into the city center!! Only extremely rich people stay in the islands of Verona. At the moment Brad Pitt and Angelina are here shooting a movie!! And the first night in Venice I got to watch them filming... although neither one of them were on the set.

With Venice being so hard to get to you might wonder why it was built in the first place. A long time ago main land Europe was getting attacked by the Huns, and they were destorying and stealing everything that they could get their hands on. Well the people that lived on mainland Italy were fisherman and knew the waters of Venice really well... so they decided to pack up and move across the water where they would be safe.

While we were on our boat ride our tour guide was telling us information about Venice and one thing that he mentioned was that it has a lot of problems with flooding when the hide tide comes in, and we all kind of nodded and was like... ohhh okay. Well when we were eating dinner it started to pour down rain, and the wind really picked up as the high tide came in and the streets flooded!!!!!!! We had to walk on staffolds to get around the city because we couldn't walk down any of the flooded roads. It was really crazy, but kinda cool to see. I took some pictures that I'll put up later on!!! Definetely an interesting experience to say the least.

Today when we went into the city it was mostly dry until the end when it rained a little bit... but it was a great day in Venice. I got to go on a gondola ride!!! Yippee!!! :) It was really cool. I'll post up some pictures so you can see what it was like... but you really can't get to parts of venice without a boat/gondola because like I said there aren't any roads there. I'm sorry that this post isn't that thorough, but I only have an hour on here... and my time is almost up!! Ahhh!!! I'll give a lot more details when I can post pictures!!

Today I also got to go into St. Marks Catherdal... which was by the FAR the most gorgeous church I have EVER been inside of... it was simply breathtaking to see. The walls were made up of different colors of marble, and there were decorations and paintings on the ceiling in pure gold... and it was just a fantastic site to see. Best of all it's free to get into it... you just have to pay to go to the top of it, and to go into a musuem they have and what not... but just getting into the church and looking around is free... It would have been worth paying though. I thought St. Paul's was gorgeous, but this one was a lot nicer!! You can tell that the Ventians were really really rich at one point, because this church is extraordinarly decorated. I really really enjoyed it. The outside is really really nice as well, so you'll get to see a sample of it later on!!

Without pictures and my time limit I'm afraid this is about all that I can tell you about Venice at the moment. But it really was a chance of the lifetime, because I don't think I will ever be able to make it to Venice on my own. It was soooo hard trying to get into the city, and it's a very complicated city. The roads are very very easy to get lost on, because they aren't straight roads... they twist and turn throughout the city. So without a guide arraigning stuff it would be really hard to do. It was really nice though. I'm happy I got to go, because I know had I not come on this trip I wouldn't have seen any of the marvelous cities that I got to see for the past couple of days!! But I'll tell you some interesting stories later on, because I have to go now!! :)