Thursday May 31st

After touring around most of Venice Tuesday and Wednesday, on Thursday the group left the main island and traveled to the Venetian suburb of Lido. We boarded Venice’s public boat transportation to travel to the small island, and then boarded a public bus to make our way to the beach to relax and catch some sun. While we traveled no more than probably 10 miles total, our trip from the hotel to the secluded beach took almost two and a half hours. Although public transportation is cheap, sometimes you get what you pay for when it comes to travel time.

View from my spot on the beach

Once we made it to the beach we all grabbed a quick lunch and headed down to the sand. It was almost eerie as we walked down to the beach and realized that there were probably only about six other people within sight of the spot we chose for the day. Even though it was an early Thursday afternoon, I expected to see a lot more people on such a warm and sunny day. However, I definitely didn’t complain about the lack of noise and people on the beach. We spent the next few hours relaxing and discussing our journey so far through Europe. Since we had to catch a train to Vienna later Thursday night, we left the beach about 3:30 to head back to the hotel to grab quick showers and pack up our bags.

Photos from our boat ride to the train station

After rinsing off the sand and saltwater, we made our way to the train station for our overnight train to Vienna. While I knew this journey would not be the most fun time of our trip, I had no idea what was in store for us as we prepared to board the train. We boarded the train a little before 9 PM and made our way to our sleeping cabins. Since we have a large group, we reserved our spots ahead of time and I shared a sleeping cabin with five of my fellow classmates. The sleeping cabin wasn’t completely terrible, roughly measuring six feet wide by eight feet long by nine feet high, but we were certainly packed in there like sardines. As we were getting settled into the cabin and preparing to depart the station, everyone in the group began to notice the lack of air conditioning in the entire train car. For some reason that nobody could comprehend, the air conditioning would not function on only our train car. As you can imagine, multiple sleeping cabins of six people in extremely close quarters with no air conditioning, or ventilation of any kind for that matter, was a recipe for disaster. To make matters worse, the train car was also without Internet or plugs to recharge our computers. After complaining for a while, I decided that my complaints weren’t going to help anything and decided instead to just take my shirt off and try to relax. After about three of the hottest hours of my life, shirtless in a tiny sleeping cabin, the air conditioning magically came on and I was able to sleep a few hours before arriving in Vienna Friday morning at about 8:30. While the overnight train ride was terrible for a while, it certainly provided a funny story afterwards.    

After a couple of weeks in Italy, we will be spending the next few days in Vienna followed by Prague. While it seem like months ago that I first arrived in London, my trip across Europe has been all I could ask for and more.