This last weekend we visited Venice. Wow. How do you express that in words?
Looking for a cheap place to stay in Venice is hard, but we found the Rainbow Biological Garden/Campground that looked quaint and super cheap outside of the city. You get off at the bus stop and then walk a mile thru green countryside to get there. When we did, they assigned me a tent (my traveling partner, Katie, brought her own tent) with a mattress and full bedding inside. Workers were coming and going lazily, picking apricots and zucchinis and making wine in huge kegs. We met a guy named Matthew, from Portland, who has been traveling Italy for almost a year with his girlfriend, camping out and making ends meet by playing music. He was strumming his guitar without a shirt on and singing an enchanting song about a gypsy lady. I felt strangely at home in this place; it felt a lot like the Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman.
They had a huge rack of 30 or so bikes, and they gave us a lock and let us borrow bikes to get to the bus station. We found at later that the LDS Church building was about a mile away, which was a huge blessing on Sunday.
Walking thru Venice is literally like walking thru Disneyland. Every turn you take you stop and say, "Mamma mia, che bello!" You see people riding Gondolas, you hear accordion music, you see people feeding hordes of pigeons breadcrumbs right out of their hands. We told one local Italian, "It is easy to get lost in Venice." He said, "BISOGNA perdersi!" "YOU MUST get lost!" We found his words to be true, the more lost we got the more beautiful it became.
We had a couple of young, charming girls from BYU in our group who decided to stay out at night to watch the world cup with Italians in the Piazza. I demonstrated how to use an umbrella to keep nasty Italian guys away from them, and then I said, "Ok, Candace, you practice. Pretend I am a sleazy italian guy trying to hit on you." Before I could approach her, an italian guy in his twenties walked out of no where and put his arm around her and invited her to his friend's bachelor party that evening. Sometimes I am grateful to not have to worry about being female.
We watched the world cup Italy vs. England game back at the campsite on a TV. Italy won, 2 to 1, and it was very fun to feel the excitement every time a goal was made. The other guests chatted with us the whole time, which made it hard to watch the game, but funner all the same. I love how Italians can chat for hours.
In church the next morning, I saw Anziano Lindsay and Kessler, two elders I had taught in the MTC. It was wonderful to see them and to hear of the miracles that are happening in their mission. They recently had a 26 year old young man, who had studied the church for 2 years, join, and the blessed the sacrament. He looked like an RM. He glowed. He is a psychologist and a swimmer, in fact he won the national swimming championship some time ago. It was cool to see the gathering that took place in him and in Venice.
We went to the bus stop to make it back to our bus which would take us home, but we realized that the busses don't run on Sundays! We panicked, we had half an hour to get where we needed to be. Across the parking lot of the supermarket we saw someone wave to us. It was a member couple and their two kids who we had seen earlier in church. They were traveling back to Switzerland, and were happy to give us a desperately needed ride. It was a truly tender mercy.
One other tender mercy: as we walked along the canal (Venice is build on a sandy foundation of 3 islands, it sinks about a centimeter each year. #globalwarming) I heard someone yell, "Peter!!" It was my elementary school chum, Cameron Webster! Katie and I, he and his two siblings sat and chatted for a good hour, remembering yellow-brown puddles of snow on the playground, the times when we got in trouble for throwing dandelions on the playground, how he got kicked out of choir for misbehavior and then got put back in because other students wanted to get out of choir as well, and the love that the teachers had shown us. He said, "Anderson school is a public school that acts like a private school." I think he is mostly right. We both felt very blessed.
Looking for a cheap place to stay in Venice is hard, but we found the Rainbow Biological Garden/Campground that looked quaint and super cheap outside of the city. You get off at the bus stop and then walk a mile thru green countryside to get there. When we did, they assigned me a tent (my traveling partner, Katie, brought her own tent) with a mattress and full bedding inside. Workers were coming and going lazily, picking apricots and zucchinis and making wine in huge kegs. We met a guy named Matthew, from Portland, who has been traveling Italy for almost a year with his girlfriend, camping out and making ends meet by playing music. He was strumming his guitar without a shirt on and singing an enchanting song about a gypsy lady. I felt strangely at home in this place; it felt a lot like the Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman.
They had a huge rack of 30 or so bikes, and they gave us a lock and let us borrow bikes to get to the bus station. We found at later that the LDS Church building was about a mile away, which was a huge blessing on Sunday.
Walking thru Venice is literally like walking thru Disneyland. Every turn you take you stop and say, "Mamma mia, che bello!" You see people riding Gondolas, you hear accordion music, you see people feeding hordes of pigeons breadcrumbs right out of their hands. We told one local Italian, "It is easy to get lost in Venice." He said, "BISOGNA perdersi!" "YOU MUST get lost!" We found his words to be true, the more lost we got the more beautiful it became.
We had a couple of young, charming girls from BYU in our group who decided to stay out at night to watch the world cup with Italians in the Piazza. I demonstrated how to use an umbrella to keep nasty Italian guys away from them, and then I said, "Ok, Candace, you practice. Pretend I am a sleazy italian guy trying to hit on you." Before I could approach her, an italian guy in his twenties walked out of no where and put his arm around her and invited her to his friend's bachelor party that evening. Sometimes I am grateful to not have to worry about being female.
We watched the world cup Italy vs. England game back at the campsite on a TV. Italy won, 2 to 1, and it was very fun to feel the excitement every time a goal was made. The other guests chatted with us the whole time, which made it hard to watch the game, but funner all the same. I love how Italians can chat for hours.
In church the next morning, I saw Anziano Lindsay and Kessler, two elders I had taught in the MTC. It was wonderful to see them and to hear of the miracles that are happening in their mission. They recently had a 26 year old young man, who had studied the church for 2 years, join, and the blessed the sacrament. He looked like an RM. He glowed. He is a psychologist and a swimmer, in fact he won the national swimming championship some time ago. It was cool to see the gathering that took place in him and in Venice.
We went to the bus stop to make it back to our bus which would take us home, but we realized that the busses don't run on Sundays! We panicked, we had half an hour to get where we needed to be. Across the parking lot of the supermarket we saw someone wave to us. It was a member couple and their two kids who we had seen earlier in church. They were traveling back to Switzerland, and were happy to give us a desperately needed ride. It was a truly tender mercy.
One other tender mercy: as we walked along the canal (Venice is build on a sandy foundation of 3 islands, it sinks about a centimeter each year. #globalwarming) I heard someone yell, "Peter!!" It was my elementary school chum, Cameron Webster! Katie and I, he and his two siblings sat and chatted for a good hour, remembering yellow-brown puddles of snow on the playground, the times when we got in trouble for throwing dandelions on the playground, how he got kicked out of choir for misbehavior and then got put back in because other students wanted to get out of choir as well, and the love that the teachers had shown us. He said, "Anderson school is a public school that acts like a private school." I think he is mostly right. We both felt very blessed.
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