You can do Venice in 4 hours, but we did it 20.

This past weekend, I went to Florence as my previous post conveyed. I went out with some of my friends who are studying in Florence and then woke up early the next morning to leave for Venice. I went with the brave souls in the picture below (shout out to Alex, Chris, Nick, Andrew, Angela, Ayla, and Lindsey). I call them brave because when we left we had no idea what kind of adventure we were embarking on. We went because Venice is the home of Carnivale, like the best 2.5 week festival pre-Lent. The event was full of people dressed in costumes and traditional masks as shown on the picture to the left. San Marco Square also had a big stage which was the center of all the events. On the day we went, there was a costume party for the kids and then a bunch of different bands.

It ended up being an adventure because we had assumed that the Carnivale would be something on the scale of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and that it would be this all out party that lasted way into the night. So we thought we would hang out until like 10 pm and leave on the 10 pm train. Our other option was to stay longer and leave at 3 am. Well the Carnivale ended roughly around 10 pm and there was no train at 10 and the train at 3 was sold out. The next train was not leaving for Florence until 6:30 in the morning. So we had to consume ourselves with doing something for roughly another 8 hours. A lot of the time was spent trying to sleep in random stairs and in the train station. All of us were exhausted by the end of the "short day trip".