Interrail Episode 1: Venice

Travelling

Mean of Transport: Train. Obviously. But I´m meantioning it anyway, because then ther´s more text and I seem so much more professional.

Stops and Stages: Ratisbon - Munich - Verona - Venice

(Original Plan was to go from Munich to Venice directly, but shitty Deutsche Bahn ruined it by delaying our arrival in Munich by just enough to make us miss the next train.)

Overall Traveltime: About 9 hours.

Hostel

Name: Hotel Airone.

Location: Right across the train staion. Only one canal in between.

Room:

• Very small
• A bit creepy at first (when you enter at night) 
• Weird walls covered cloth
• Stunning view out of the window, which has some incredibly stylish shutters
• Shower right in the middle of the bathroom

Breakfast: Outside in a nice garden. Standard food. Overall nothing to complain about.

Rating: 3,5/5 Rialto-Bridges

City

Highlights:

Piazza San Marco
Biggest plaza of Venice. Absurdly crowded. Nice architectural design around it. Has an open side to the sea, where Gondolas arrive and get off in a neverending cycle. Home of the famous lion. 

Rialto-Bridge
There are a ton of bridges in Venice, but this one is the most famous abd also one of the biggest. Also a tourist-magnet, so once again loads and loads of people everywhere. Little stores directly on the bridge (seems a bit like a sellout of such a famous and culturally relevant piece of architecture).

Canale Grande
The Rialto of the many canals of Venice: biggest and most famous. Sometimes so big, it almost could be a river. A very dirty river. Main "traffic route" of Venice, kind of like a highway. 

Weather

Hot. Way to hot. When I got off the train, I felt like running into a wall facefirst. And it stayed this way. There was not a single moment where the temperature dropped below 30° Celsius, even at night. It is pretty nice to feel the mediterran heat, but it gets annoying and frustrating after a while. Especially at daytime, you can not stay out in the sun for long. No rain of course.

Summary

Venice is a beautiful city. I love the fact that there are no cars. It makes the streets pretty crowded, because everyone has to walk, but nonetheless is it a nice and refreshing experience. The architecture of all the buildings is gorgeous, like all mediterran cities are. I feel like the light there is much more golden, presenting everything in a nicer way. 
But there is also a darker side to Venice. I have never seen more poor people and immigrants trying to sell things and begging for money in such a small area than there. A hard contrast to the situation in Germany.
Also, pigeons. Pigeons everywhere.

Photos

First view at the trainstation In Venice

Our small but comfy hotelroom

The trainstaion right across our hotel

One of the famous gondolas

A typical salley in Venice

The Rialto-Bridge

Pigeons.
The secret rulers of Venice.

Piazza San Marco with a typical amount of people

The Lion of Saint Marc, the heraldic animal of Venice

Canale Grande

Interrail 2015 - Introduction

I recently finished school. What do you do after you finish school?

You go as far away from it as possible. You travel around. Explore the world. Have fun. Enjoy your freedom.

So here´s what I did. This will be the epic tale of an unprecedented adventure. A modern version of the Odyssee, just with less problems, shorter and witout boats. But nevertheless epic, heroic and tense.

My girlfriend an me decided to do an Interrail-Trip. The Interrail Global-Pass allows you to travel around in Europe by train with one ticket. In some cases you have to buy a reservation, but overall you just need that one ticket. We decided to buy the one for 22 days. There are also other options (click here for further information).

Once we had pinned that down, we went on to prepare the other things.

1 Planning the route
We planned the route for our trip. This took up some time, because we initially thought of going to Spain (Madrid and Barcelona) after we finished Italy as first country, but the train connections down there seem to be very bad and really slow. It would have been just travelling instead of really being anywhere. So we cut that out and laid our route directly to France after our last Italian stop, Milano.
Also London was high on our "Must-Visit-List". At first. Then we discovered that we´d have to pay nearly 250 Euros each for only the train to London. The same amount for the train from London to the next stop. Pretty ridiculous, especially with the budget of a poor teenager. So London got cut out aswell. But we already knew our stops before and after that (Paris and Amsterdam) and decided to visit Brussls instead.
The final route looked like this:

1. Venice (01/07 - 03/07)
2. Rome (03/07 - 05/07)
3. Florence (05/07 - 07/07)
4. Milano (07/07 - 08/07)
5. Nice (08/07 - 10/07)
6. Marseille (10/07 - 12/07)
7. Lyon (12/07 - 14/07)
8. Paris (14/07 - 17/07)
9. Brussels (17/07 - 20/07)
10. Amsterdam (20/07 - 22/07)

Our route
(I had to screenshot this map and draw the route myself because Google Maps doesn´t support more than 10 waypoints for some absurd reason)

It´s mostly Italy and France, but that was already our first plan, so we were fine with that.

2 Planning the stays
We decided I´d would be the best, if we spent our nights in youth hostels. They are in every bigger city, sometimes even two or more and they are fairly cheap. We registered ourself in the Hostelling-International network. If you are under 26 years of age the membership costs you 7 Euros per year. In most countries we visited, a membership was obligatory for staying in the hostels. You can get them directly in the hostels or order it at home before your trip. Membership-prices are a bit cheaper, it will make up for the 7 Euros easily.

The membershipcard from Hostelling Internationa

We also had to book regular hotels in Venice and Milano, because we were late and the youth hostels were already booked out for the time of our stay. But it wasn´t much trouble, the booking process was equally comfortable.

3 Packaging

When you go on an epic adventure like we did, you need something to transport your stuff. For us, the best option was to get a backpack. A really big backpack. You get pretty good advice on what you really need in specialised shops, like sportshops. I bought my backpack here.


                     

And, I gotta say it was the perfect choice. All of my stuff fit in easily (I even had space left), it was a great feeling when having it on and you don´t ever have to worry about your damn suitcase being to big or losing on of those tiny wheels and having to carry it in a very uncomfortable way afterwards. 

  

Another great thing I took with me was a smaller backpack, which you can fold in itself to make it transportable requiring very little space. You can use this for daily trips to cities, so you don´t always have to carry all your stuff with you, but still can bring a bottle of water and a rainjacket. One of the best gadgets you can get for a journey like this.

For clothes, I think I was fine. I had enough of everything. But that is all personal preference.
What else did I take with me? Smartphone, camera, MP3-Player, powerchargers, some cash of course, stuff for hygiene and health. Also make sure to bring your ID, very important.


So, yeah, that was the preparation for the trip. Easy as pie. Not really in reality, especially if it´s your first time doing such a long trip for yourself. But it´s a very useful experience, you leran a lot about organizing different things at a time, dealing with customer service and planning something, that won´t work out the way you imagined it. You have to really pt some work into it, but then finally everything will be done and you can be very proud and just enjoy the awesome trip.
Which will bring up new problems.
But that is subject to future posts.
Stay tuned!