"Amanda's Weekend in Venice" by Rod Sterling: Part III of ?

Sun 22 Feb 2009

********Friday afternoon/night*******

In a very necessary fashion, we napped. Though we had gone separate ways after we found San Marco, all of us were in some dire need of sleep after a restless train ride and walking around since 5 a.m. in the Twilight Zone. The only problem with our room was that with the windows on the balcony closed, it was nearly pitch black no matter what the time of day was. One of the girls set her alarm for about two hours after we slept. I felt like I could sleep at least another eight when it went off, but I knew if I didn't get up then, I never would.

I quietly snuck out of the room while the other girls (I was in a room with the ones from Arizona) continued their nap. I wanted to see the Jewish ghetto while I was here, and with tomorrow being Saturday and us leaving around 11 a.m. Sunday, Friday before sundown was my only chance to do it.

It was a little after 16:00 when I left the apartment to walk over to the ghetto. The sun was still out, but much lower in the still cloudless sky and getting ready to set. I checked the map before I left, and that's it–much like the positive side of the Twilight Zone for the rest of the weekend, every time I walked somewhere solo I somehow found my way quite speedily, with little to no map-aid, and no (that I know of) wrong turns.

There wasn't much in the ghetto novo. A kosher restaurant with a good looking menu had a prime location right near the entrance. The big Campo de Ghetto Novo was filled with young children playing and their parents chatting on the side, which was simple and quaint to watch for a bit. A door near the synagogue had a mezuzah on it, leading me to believe it was the apartment of some Jewish family. And I didn't get to see the part that I really wanted, which was inside the synagogue.

By the time I got to it, people were already starting to arrive for Friday night services. Thinking back now, maybe I could've gone in and stayed for it, but at the time I felt too underdressed in my jeans and sweatshirt and too awkward to enter.

I took my time getting back to my apartment, enjoying the bustling island preparing for pre-Carnivale celebrations. I got back in through four sets of keys, enjoyed the heated floor, changed, and went to meet Amy, Chris, Nicole, Kelly and Rob for a sushi place supposedly located near Accademia.

As I mentioned, getting anywhere was, for some reason, cake for me. To bigger places like Accademia, randomly placed and often hidden signs on some streets helped direct me.

It was probably about 45 minutes after I got to the bridge near Accademia when the rest of them arrived. Uselessly, I had power-walked there, thinking it would be the other way around. Who knows why my sense of direction became super keen in Venice, but somehow it worked.

We walked a couple unsuccessful blocks looking for the sushi place when Amy took out her Blackberry to Google it. The search engine gave us a phone number, an address halfway across the island and a menu that said dinner for two cost 80 euro. So we scrapped that plan, picked a direction and walked in it. The Blackberry told us tales of supposed cheap restaurants, but in Venezia, especially during Carnivale, that's more of a yeah, right. But, thanks to Rob's growling stomach, we eagle-eyed a restaurant set a bit further back in a dead end street with decent prices. And, as we soon ate and discovered, more than decent food and a pretty awesome vino rosso della casa.

The rest were pretty tired after dinner though, so we went our separate ways. I hoped whatever sense of direction that somehow appeared within my being would guide me back to the hostel the same way it had guided me to Accademia. Well, it worked on some level–I bumped right into Aaron on the way back and found myself in the middle of Santa Margarita, where pretty much everyone else was meeting up that night.

Nick and Derek were already at a table outside Orange, a bar filled with foreigners spending the weekend at Carnivale. Out of nowhere appeared, in no particular order, just about everyone else from Viterbo. We spent the night hopping around the bars in Santa Margarita, enjoying the night of going out pre-Carnivale festivities.