TRA[life]VELS

Our most recent AmBex adventure took us to Italy to study Art History with Professor Horner. Our first stop was Salzburg, Austria so we wouldn't have to spend the entire first day driving. Salzburg is the home of "The Sound of Music" so before we left we had a movie night and watched the whole thing...which is perfect, because who wouldn't want "I am 16 going on 17..." stuck in their head 24 hours before it needed to be? Anyway, Salzburg was fun, but it had just gotten dumped on by snow the night before. The snow started sticking to the highway and delayed our drive a bit, so we didn't actually get there until close to midnight. The next day we went on "The Sound of Music Tour" which ironically didn't include much sound of music besides the soundtrack playing over the tour bus speakers. All in all it was a good time, but what we were all really looking foward to was Italy.

On Monday we arrived in Padova, Italy which is the sister city of Venice (about 30 minutes away). We got to Padova at night so the next morning we had the entire day to spend in Venice. Venice was actually really cold and windy, which isn't too typical for this time of year, and it actually started to snow a bit. The city is so cool. It has a ton of history. The entire thing was built on a bunch of logs that were jammed into the sediment around the 12th century...because of the lack of oxygen down there, the logs never rotted and the city has been sitting there ever since! Every street you turn down, you're in another narrow alley, surrounded by old brick buildings, and occasionally crossing one of the many canals that run through the city. I couldn't help think of movies like "The Italian Job" every time we saw a boat putting down a canal. Our first stop was going to be San Marcos Plaza to see the Cathedral San Marcos and a Doge Museum. In order to get there, we crossed the grand canal...where the canal is the biggest and the one that I'm used to seeing in all the pictures of Venice. The Cathedral San Marcos was built on what looks like a giant dock that is San Marcos Plaza. The Cathedral doesn't look much at all like the ones we've been seeing in Germany and Austria. Horner explained to us that when you go further south especially in Italy, you will find Eastern influences in both architecture and religion. Some of the building windows looked like something you'd see in "Aladdin" and the supposedly Catholic Cathedral looked more like an Eastern Orthodox church. After we finished learning about the cathedral, we went back out to the plaza and couldn't ignore the masses of pigeons that were entertaining all the visitors. Andrew and Tanner actually managed to catch one of the greedy pigeons in Tanner's bag. Once it was in the bag we couldn't just let it go, so they thought of a creative way to make use of a pigeon in a bag. They waited until Courtney came around and handed her the bag. She didn't exactly scream like we were hoping, but she was surprised for sure. The pigeon didn't even seem to care, like it had happened to him before...he was just chillin' in the bag for a good 20 minutes. We went to the Doge's (Duke's) Palace turned museum after that and then took the train back to Padova so we could prepare to leave the next morning for Florence. To our surpise, we woke up to heavy snow!...not good if you have to take a route that goes through the Appenine Mountains, and especially if you have no chains for your tires.

To be continued...