Arrival! (Safely and without mishap)

The tedium of travel faded away as I lost my self in “The Daughter of Venice” as well as the first two installments of the Three Investigators (“The Secret of Terror Castle” and “The Stuttering Parrot”). I know, I know. The Three Investigators have absolutely nothing to do with Venice. But I have been meaning to reread them for some time now and I figured this was as good a time as ever. After I finished with “The Stuttering Parrot”, I started reading a generic mystery novel that I found for free online. Why this choice? Because I know that if I had begun to read the Foundation series (which was my first choice) even Venice would probably not have been able to distract me from my Kindle. But a generic mystery novel? It can wait.

It is really a beautiful city. I took this photo from my smartphone (it leaves something to be desired…but then again…so did my regular point-and-shoot):

That’s the Grand Canal! (I just found the night setting on my phone. So if I have to take any more pics after sundown, hopefully they will be of better quality).

And my computer doesn’t recognize my smartphone. Problem? Nah. Not when you have Dropbox. I just connected both my phone and my netbook to the free WiFi here and then uploaded the photo to dropbox from my phone. Don’t have Dropbox yet? Install here for free and get 250 MB of extra space! Yeah, yeah…I know I am completely geeky, but seriously? If you have two devices running two separate operating systems, then you should at least try it. I guarantee that you will use it at least once! And it is completely free! So if you have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or run dual operating systems, just check it out. You can probably find some use for it even if you don’t use two operating systems.

Sorry…that was an extremely geeky paragraph. And I am supposed to be writing about Venice, the “most romantic city on Earth”. Or something like that. Oh well…I guess you can take me out of Geekland but you can’t take the geek out of me!

Anyway…the walk to the hostel was short and nice and quite pretty. There are a lot of stands on the street with people selling many different souvenirs and other toys. They have a lot of masks! I forgot that  Venice is famous for masks. I could buy one…but personally they scare the living daylights out of me, so I would never be able to hang it up in my room or anything. I would just shove it in the box of souvenirs at the top of closet…but who knows.

The thing that I actually noticed the most was that there are a TON of Americans here. I haven’t seen that many Americans in one place since…well…since I was in America. I guess it is because almost every American student now has summer break and almost every American student who comes to Europe to travel ends up in Venice eventually. So it figures. I spotted a guy wearing basketball shorts! It was actually a breath of fresh air…

In any case, I think I am going to go to bed now so that I can rest up and be ready for a beautiful day of exploration tomorrow. So stay tuned!