Venice

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Venice was amazing, and I could write several blogs on our trip. I've been thinking about what I would want to say about it. For one it was a beautiful city, even though I'm not one for a lot of water, it was beautiful walking along the canals or standing on the Rialto bridge looking over the Grand Canal with the buildings lined up on either side, right next to the water. We kept thinking that it really does look like all the pictures we had seen. We couldn't believe it was really that pretty. There were no cars but watching the boats negotiate though the canals was a different form of rush hour. They have every function of another city but in the form of a boat; garbage, mail, personal boats, buses, taxi's, delivery, we even saw a boat that had frozen fruit or something to that effect that you could buy from it.
One of the things I didn't so much enjoy was the amount of people. Moving around was tough enough but having to have to navigate with our luggage was another story entirely. The only time we didn't encounter enough people to feel as if we would get run over was in the morning before 9 or 10 when the shops opened. At that point it was mostly locals on their way to work. And walking through rush hour n Venice can be just as hectic and terrifying as driving a car in any other city. It was the sheer amount of people though that really clued me into why the locals don't exactly the like tourists even if they are why the economy is thriving. With the amount of tourists to Venetians is about 400 to 1. The two place where that could be seen the most was the market place by the Rialto bridge and St. Mark's square.
St. Mark's square was really cool. The church was beautiful full of mosaics and various other decorations that would take forever to describe and unfortunately no pictures are allowed inside. Since we didn't wait in the line outside that would have taken hours because we were with a tour group we got the abbreviated version and only walked around the ground floor. We did however walk past where St. Mark's (or Mark, of the gospel of Mark, for those of us who aren't catholic) remains apparently rest. Adjacent to the church was the Doge's palace, basically the government building. One one side there was the prison, connecting the two was a bridge, famously known as the bridge of sighs because prisoners crossed it just before they were taken to be executed. On the other side is two pillars that are known as the entrance to the city. They also happened to be the exit since it is between the two that prisoners were executed, looking at the clock so they knew exactly when they died. Nice thought huh? As far as other major sights that we saw besides the Rialto bridge which was cool but it was just a bridge with shops on it, even if it is the oldest one in Venice. Anyway we went to the Academia museum, which is the most famous in Venice and toured around looking at the paintings. most of the depicted a biblical scene or a story from Catholicism which is what my mom enjoyed looking at most since neither of us are really the artistic type, but they were beautiful paintings.
As for my favorite part of the trip it would have to be the shopping. Everything there was just so cool. My favorite thing that I saw and luckily it was everywhere! were the masks that are traditional in Venice for the Carnival that takes place in February. They were all so amazing i had a hard time keeping my eyes off of them. During our tour we found out that the masks were used during the early venetian period as a way for politicians to keep the anonymity while doing deals that may have questionable morals. After finding this out I realized why I liked them so much :). Prostitutes however were not allowed to wear them, their identities had to be known, as well as commoners. Only those with status or a title could wear them. The glass that came from Murano island was also incredibly cool.
I decided this blog would be less of a day to day occurrence and more about what I liked and disliked. As I have said in my other blogs if you want to know anything else about it just ask. If I think of anything else I'll make a new blog about it.Thanks for reading!

Venice- getting to our hotel

So for our mid semester break my mom came over and took me and Makara to Venice for a few days. My mom got here on Friday and I picked her up from the airport and got to show her around Hamar a little bit, again such as my apartment, school and places I normally go to. On Saturday afternoon we went down to the Oslo airport because we had a 6:30 am flight on Sunday. We ended up eating dinner at the airport since it had the most selection of food that was too expensive, as compared with our hotel. Our hotel was literally across the street from the entrance to the airport which made it easy to go back and forth between except for the continuous downpour, biting winds and low 40 degree weather we werre encountering.
Sunday morning we got about 3:30 to take our bags over to check them. We came back to our hotel to check out and eat breakfast and then went back to go through security. We made it through and over to our gate where we sat for a while. They started to call for boarding and from where we were sitting we couldn't see a plane but thought it was only our angle. As we walked down the gate we saw people going down stairs and no plane to be seen. Everyone was getting on a bus, we were so confused, especially at 6am. The bus drove us over to our plane where we then had to stand outside in the freezing cold and wet tarmac as we climbed up some steep stairs to finally board the plane. This was only the first flight of the day. On the way to Amsterdam we were able to watch the sunrise over Europe. The most beautiful part was flying over the Alps. They were the most gorgeous mountain range I have even seen in my life. After the plane landed in Amsterdam we had to negotiate our way through a very busy airport to find our next gate since we only had about an hour before the plane was to take off. This time there was a plane to get directly on to and the second flight was as uneventful as the first.
After we landed and got our bags we tried again to figure out where and if we go through customs. Again we don't, so technically we have no proof we were ever in Italy, but we were. My mom figured out where we were supposed to go to catch the water bus to get to Venice. We got down there and boarded the bus that would take about an hour to reach Venice. Me, loving boats so much, had a great time especially when bigger boats went buy and our boat had to slow down to go over the wakes. After a few stops and about an hour we made it to the Rialto bridge stop where we got off. All the bridges in Venice are stairs, we each had at least two bags and my mom had four because she was taking some things home for me. We had no idea which side of the bridge we were on. It was about midday and we were getting hungry and had already been up for some 9 hours. We asked an Italian which way we needed to go and he pointed us in the right direction but we had to go over the Rialto. One of the busiest spots in Venice, next to St. Mark's, it was jard to get over the bridge with all of our bags but we finally did it. We were only a few blocks from our hotel but since we were having trouble reading the signs again we had to ask for help. We finally made it to the hotel and draged our stuff up to the third level, again no elevators. The room was beautiful though and we were very excited that we were actually in ITALY!!!!!

Hillary and Jeff's visit

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, not too much was going on and then a whole bunch of things happened at once.
The first thing was that Hillary and Jeff came to visit me here! They got to Norway on Sunday and through Wednesday morning they were on Norway in a nutshell. Wednesday morning I picked them up at the Hamar train station and brought them back to my apartment. Wednesday for the most part we just hung out and I showed them where I live, go to school and a little bit of the town. the weather wasn't great the first or the second day so it was hard to show them how pretty it was when we were walking around on Wednesday. Thursday I had class all day so they had to fend for themselves. Friday we decided to go see some of the things in Hamar I hadn't really seen yet. However since I hadn't been there before and we didn't have a clear idea of where we were going or a good map we pretty much just walked around Hamar and eventually ended up at the train museum which Jeff had wanted to go to. Most of the touristy things close in early September as we had found out and even though we got to walk through the museum it wasn't as it would have been if it were during the summer. The rest of the day we hung out, they made dinner for me and Makara and it was delicious :D, because i had cooked on Wednesday evening, theirs was better though. Saturday we went down to Oslo and looked at some of the main tourist attraction there such as the royal palace, a couple of museums and Vigeland sculpture park, which is one of the most famous places in Norway. We had dinner and I got the 7:30 train back to Hamar so they could catch their flight the next morning.
It was hard to say goodbye since I haven't really been able to talk to them while i'm over here except on facebook, but I really enjoyed their visit and it made it easier on me to have family visit in the middle of the trip. It gave me something to look forward too when adjusting here the first month or so was difficult. It made it easier to say goodbye, even though i was sad to see them go, was that my mom would be coming in less than a week and we were going to go to Venice for my break.
My blog about Venice and my mom visiting will be in a few different segments so you may read them as you wish :)