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.\u00a0 Getting to Bergamo wasn’t a problem and catching a bus to the city centre wasn’t any harder.\u00a0 The problem came when we had to find the room we had rented.<\/p>\n
Instead of staying in a hotel or hostel as we have on all previous trips, we booked an apartment for Friday night.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I tried calling the number we had but apparently our phones can’t reach Italian numbers in Italy.\u00a0 We were about ready to head back to town and pay out the nose for a hotel next to the street when…<\/p>\n
We saw a bar!\u00a0 We walked through the cloud of smoke and asked the bouncer where this address was.\u00a0 The bartender pulled out a phone book, much discussion ensued, and then the only employee who spoke English told us what they thought.\u00a0 We did find it after that but the gate was locked.\u00a0 After walking back to the bar and asking them to call the number for us we finally made it to the apartment.<\/p>\n
There was a liter of milk in the apartment’s fridge and I was quite thirsty Friday night.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there was no good way to open this cardboard box of milk.\u00a0 So I poked it with a fork until there was a sizable hole.\u00a0 It was about this time that I noticed the expiration date on the box.\u00a0 This milk was good until January 2009.\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 These Italians have discovered the secret of milk preservation!\u00a0 Things were looking good until I smelled the milk.\u00a0 You all know what spoiled milk smells like, but you have no idea what weird, Italian, milk-in-a-box smells like.\u00a0 Picture yourself walking down an alley in Brooklyn, passing a few homeless guys, and sticking your nose in a dumpster.\u00a0 That’s what weird, Italian, milk-in-a-box milk smells like.<\/p>\n
The next morning we made our way to the train station and headed toward Venice.<\/p>\n\n\t\t