To get to Venice without spending an inordinate amount of money we had to fly to Bergamo (outside Milan), stay the night there, and take the train to Venice the next morning.  Getting to Bergamo wasn’t a problem and catching a bus to the city centre wasn’t any harder.  The problem came when we had to find the room we had rented.

Instead of staying in a hotel or hostel as we have on all previous trips, we booked an apartment for Friday night.  The pictures looked really nice and the price was good, but we didn’t know the directions were entirely inaccurate until we found ourselves walking around an unfamiliar Italian town at 10:30pm.  I tried calling the number we had but apparently our phones can’t reach Italian numbers in Italy.  We were about ready to head back to town and pay out the nose for a hotel next to the street when…

We saw a bar!  We walked through the cloud of smoke and asked the bouncer where this address was.  The bartender pulled out a phone book, much discussion ensued, and then the only employee who spoke English told us what they thought.  We did find it after that but the gate was locked.  After walking back to the bar and asking them to call the number for us we finally made it to the apartment.

There was a liter of milk in the apartment’s fridge and I was quite thirsty Friday night.  Unfortunately, there was no good way to open this cardboard box of milk.  So I poked it with a fork until there was a sizable hole.  It was about this time that I noticed the expiration date on the box.  This milk was good until January 2009.  Wow!  These Italians have discovered the secret of milk preservation!  Things were looking good until I smelled the milk.  You all know what spoiled milk smells like, but you have no idea what weird, Italian, milk-in-a-box smells like.  Picture yourself walking down an alley in Brooklyn, passing a few homeless guys, and sticking your nose in a dumpster.  That’s what weird, Italian, milk-in-a-box milk smells like.

The next morning we made our way to the train station and headed toward Venice.