if the form vanishes its root is eternal.

so, venice. carnevale. absolutely ridiculous. our train arrived around 9, only for us to discover that our hostel was about a 20 min drive away from there. poor planning. anyways, it was pretty nice and not too expensive, so it was def worth the extra money for transportation to and from the city. pre-gamed in the hostel a bit, and then it we were off! friday night wasn't really that crowded, but we also didn't get into the actual city until maybe 11:15, so maybe most of the crowd had returned already. meet some other americans in our travels to the bars. one of the guys was named wolfgang, or so he claimed. his tongue was pierced. i interrogated him for a long time about that.

after only a few hours of sleep, we headed back into venice for the day. one thing i learned after this weekend: if i'm only staying for one night and i'm going to carry my bag around, then i'm not going to pack a heavy bag. i thought i had packed really light... but it turned out that wasn't the case. regardless, i still had a good time traversing the city and experience lots of other tourists, italians included, doing the same. although all 18 of the undergrads made it to venice, it was necessary to split up. i travelled around with a couple of other girls and for the most part, it was a really relaxing day. we bought breakfast, then went in search of masks. after finding them, we donned our festive attire and just took in the sights in sounds, slowly meandering our way towards the guggenheim. on there, i ended up running into my roommate (yay!) and our little group of 3 became 4. by around 5, i was ready to leave. the crowds had really picked up and everyone was just pushing, but there really didn't seem to be a destination in mind. we bought our train tickets, and that's when our real adventure began.

since there wasn't a direct train to arezzo, we decided to ask someone that was selling tickets. he had us go to bologna and then pick a train up there to arezzo. unfortunately, he did not do his job well and we ended up being in bologna for 5 hours. we decided to make the best of it and went to a bar for a caffeine pick-me-up and made some friends back at the train station. we got lucky on the train and found seats, although sleep was nearly impossible. finally made it back to the villa around 5:30 am. it was bound to happen sometime, so like they say in up, adventure is out there!