Good-bye Ljubljana, Hello Venecia!

I woke up fairly early the day we left Ljubljana, and walked down by the river three times, looking for Natasha, but never found her. I enjoyed the city, though, and my feeling of familiarity with it--very comfortable and confident. The festival for children was still going on, and a news crew was there--I got on camera (walking by) 2 or 3 times! :)

View from river near Natasha's stall

 We checked out of the hotel around 10 and hit the road. It was very hot. We ate lunch at IKEA in Trieste, Italy. I never knew you could eat at IKEA, but I had Swedish meatballs with gravy and lingonberry sauce and french fries, and it was pretty good!

Italian countryside--I never got a good picture of the groves of trees we passed. We didn't know what they were, but we saw a lot of them.

We got to our hotel and checked in--it was VERY expensive and did NOT include breakfast like we thought it would. In fact, breakfast cost 15 Euros each, which is about $22! We hugged Josh and J.P. good-bye, and found our rooms. They were so nice. And I had mine all to myself. :)

Our hotel

My very comfortable bed!

That bathtub looked wonderful after sharing one shower (which got the whole bathroom wet) all week!

After settling into our rooms we asked for some info. about getting from our hotel, which was actually outside of Venice, to the old city itself, and then we walked up and down the street checking things out. We found a little grocery store and bought 2 days' worth of breakfast for all 5 of us for 11 Euros total! Nice! So we did NOT buy the hotel breakfast. :) We got croissants, cheese, yogurt, fruit...I was proud of us! We also found a hole-in-the-wall local restaurant where we ended up eating supper--I had spaghetti with meat sauce, and it was so good. Amber and Ashley's spaghetti was so spicy-hot that Amber couldn't eat hers! An old Italian man toasted me and stared at me as we walked away. Creepy!

The small building on the right is where we ate, on the patio behind that gate.

Notice the Coke can next to the Pepsi glass. :)

We ended up buying bus tickets to Venecia, and rode in after supper to see what we could see! We sat by another older, very friendly Italian man who taught us a few words. Venice was VERY confusing. It was truly a maze of small streets, bridges, and tiny alleys which would open up into wide plazas. We eventually realized the map we had was useless, and found our way to St. Mark's by following the signs posted throughout the city, then followed them the other way back to the bus home--after taking a sladoled gelatto break, of course! Creme Caramel--mmm. We found the right bus and made it back to the hotel at 10. A 4-hour "jaunt" in which I was tense and nervous almost the whole time...5 women trying to find our way through the narrow, convoluted streets in the darkening dusk...I was thrilled to take a wonderful long bath and climb into my comfortable luxurious bed--aaaah!

Can you imagine living behind one of those doors?

Rialto bridge, where banking began

These are the yellow signs posted throughout the city we learned to look for and follow. I started giving invisible stickers (an old trick from my kindergarten teacher days-ha) to whichever girl found them first when we didn't know which way to go.

There were also "hand-made" signs, but they always made me a little uneasy. What if someone pointed one the wrong way just to laugh at tourists?

St. Mark's square

Plaza Roma, where we had to figure out which bus to get on to get back to our hotel. Sca-ry! (And this picture was actually taken when we first arrived--it was dark when we were going back.)