We are now in Venice

Hello everyone,

Well, we have covered quite a bit of ground since our last post. We took a flight from Athens to Milan, stayed one night and half a day in Milan, then took a train from Milan to Venice. It has been kind of a whirlwind for the past day and a half. Today, we are taking it nice and slow as we have plenty of time to explore Venice.

Milan was okay. It is totally a business/industrial type of city. It has a good cathedral (Duomo) that is definitely the biggest cathedral that we've ever been in. Milan is a nice enough place if you are passing through, but not quite a worthy destination on its own. (V says skip Milan if you can - but if you go through it for transportation reasons try and book a ticket to see the Last Supper, which we couldn't get into because it was sold out.)

So far Venice is really great to see. On one hand it isn't a fully functioning modern city because on any given day there are probably as many (if not more) tourists as there are residents. We've seen a couple of really good art museums today and we went on the poor man's gondola ride (called a traghetto, which just transfers you from one side of the Grand Canal to the other). We opted out of the full-on tourist gondola ride because it costs about $150.....our traghetto ride cost 75 cents. Our hotel in Venice (Pensione Guerrato) is pretty cool and they give you a free breakfast....which, needless to say, we scarf down in a completely shameless fashion.

We don't have a great internet situation here in Venice, but we'll be in Rome in two days and should have much better internet access there. We'll try and post more photos when we get there.