Venice, Italy (second trip, June 2005)

Venice speaks for itself. Every turned corner yields a discovery; young lovers kissing in the shadows...families walking together while slurping cones of gelato to avoid paying the fee for a table...elegant gondolas cruising beneath sloping footbridges, a hint of Italian melody hummed by the gondolier. Venice is of course also overrun with tourists in the summer, and pigeons as well: they even sell pigeon food so that tourists can seize that quintessential Venetian picture...or at least an entertaining one. We fell for this, and purchased a handful of pigeon food, outstretched our arms and were overrun with a flock of aggressive pigeons. While it was a little bit gross, it did make for some really funny pictures.
Venice is the perfect city to get lost in, it is even somewhat of a challenge to lose yourself, as most of the canals end up winding back to Piazza San Marco. My friends and I stayed close to the Piazza, but attempted to walk deep into the city, as far away as our tired soles would take us. We stumbled across unknown canals, small gated parks and alleyways strung up with laundry lines, where dozens of garments were left out to be air dried. As we moved away from the tourist hub of Piazza San Marco, the locals seemed to come out in droves, we saw kids kicking around soccer balls in the dirt and old women leaning out their shuttered windowsills, chattering away to their neighbors in rapid Italian. As we found our way back to the city center, dusk was settling in and there we saw a new side of Venice. All the lampposts came to life, and the lights that run the length of the piazza created a dazzling light that accented the stars. My friends and I ate at an outdoor bistro, drank wine, and spent the rest of our evening dancing across the piazza, laughing and singing together.