We’ve arrived in Italy… Venice to be specific. What a weird city. Houses standing on several hundred year old wooden stilts, streets that are barely passable and college students covered in flour and eggs.
We’ve encountered many strange and odd (and cute) things while on our travels so far and these are the ones that I can remember (and have pictures of to prove it)!
The first thing Bob and I encountered when landing in Germany was the language. Seriously… people talk like that all the time? Italian, spanish, french – we can all fake our way through at least a bit of those languages. German, not so much. Each word is at least 76 letters long and contains about six english words. Bob and I decided that to try to fit in we’d create our own language. Englierman. We added -stien, -hausen and -enburg to the end of all our words. At least we thought we sounded cool. “Sleepenhausen” and “gasenstien” sound legit, right?
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That says “radar checks throughout the building site area”, but you knew that already, I’m sure.
Now for something cute. If you know me you know that I love cats and so you shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve found two random cats so far. One at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany and one today in Venice.
The one in Dachau was pretty much looking and waiting for me to rescue her. We came around the corner and she was meowing at me to pick her up and started purring. I cuddled her for a bit before Bob made me abandon her when we got in the car. I thought it might be fun to have a traveling cat friend in Europe; Bob did not agree.
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Then we ran into a Gracie lookalike sitting in a window sill in Venice. He was pretty happy to stay where he was but he agreed to a photo shoot and some pets before we left him to continue to watch over his window.
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Today while in Piazza San Marco we saw a huge setup for what we figured was a college graduation ceremony. We stuck around and ate some gellato while we waited to see if anything would be starting but took off after we got too hot and ran out of ice cream. Later on, after a gondola ride though the canals, we saw this:
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Apparently, after graduation, it is tradition to dress up recent grads in ridiculous outfits, throw eggs and flour at them, and parade them around town while getting drunk only to wash them off in an ice cold fountain at the end of the night. We saw about five or six grads getting this treatment and it was pretty amusing. I think if they did this in Calgary more people would go to college. Okay, maybe just me and Bob.