Europe: Day 5 (July 9th)

We had this morning free to explore this nice little ski village of Cortina, Italy. Quite a few of us went to the ice skating arena, which has previously hosted the Winter Olympics. We got two hours of skating there for (after a rebate) €6. Having ice skated before, I wasn't too worried about not knowing how to skate. However, there were several people that had never actually ice skated before. One of the girls, Liz, a great bass clarinetist, was holding onto the wall for her dear life. I went over and helped her out with learning some of the basics. I had soon gotten her off the wall and skating on her own a little bit! I felt really good about helping her to learn how to skate. It was a really enjoyable time there. After we were done skating, a group of us went to this Italian restaurant. We ordered two very appetizing pizzas and split them in our group of 5. The price, once divided evenly, was a very affordable €4.80. After finishing our lunch, we headed back to where the buses had parked and departed for Venice, Italy! Once we arrived at our hotel, we got unpacked and got ready for dinner there. After we finished dinner, our bus took us to the boat harbor where we boarded our private vaporetto (boat bus) to the island of Venice. We had about two hours to explore this nice, busy city. Unfortunately, nearly every street looks identical as it begins to get dark in the city of Venice. Our group got lost, but we ran into another SOA group also lost in the city. We ended up combining and trying to find our way back to the meeting point, the Alligator Pillar right off of Saint Mark's Square. After hopelessly wandering the streets for a good half an hour, we had the genius idea to ask someone for directions. But when we asked a restaurant staff person for directions at about 20 minutes until we were supposed to meet, the person told us that the walk from where we were would be at least 30 minutes. We hustled the group and called our tour leader to let her know we were on our way. After winding our way through the maze of streets, we arrived just at the time we were supposed to meet. Navigating a city is much harder at nighttime!