Venice North to Venice South

I think I confused everyone by mentioning Munich -- sorry. I was only stopping in Munich for a 4.5-hour layover before taking another train to Venice. The Munich->Venice train goes through the Alps and is very beautiful, which was the main point of this endeavour rather than flying.

Meanwhile, the Amsterdam->Munich leg was a German sleeper train, highly rated by seat61; but unfortunately I bought the cheapest kind of ticket which means a seat and not a bunk. So I hardly slept. I had also been feeling like I'd had a cold in my last day in Amsterdam, and by the time I arrived in Munich I was well and truly sick... I could barely talk and couldn't stop shivering. (It was 9 degrees Celsius. I'm Canadian. Do the math.) I tried to find the warmest place possible in the Munich train station, which is hard because it has an open-air design. Found the back corner of a coffee shop whose staff spoke a little English (most didn't) and drank a lot of tea.

So much for enjoying my layover. I also didn't really spend much time watching the spectacular Alps go by. Instead I read Neal Stephenson's REAMDE almost cover to cover (it's ~1000 pages).

OK, so I did take some pictures in my befuddled state. Here is one of three giant fields of solar panels just west of Munich:

And here are some pictures of Austria.

There were a lot of cool mountain lodges and one place where they pumped water up a hill during the day so it could fall down overnight and produce electricity. A hydro dam, I guess. Sorry, my pic of that is pretty blurry.

Lost in Venice (Surprise)

Welcome to Venice!

I arrived without Google Maps, as I had forgotten to look it up in Munich, my SIM card beta testing had failed, and my train had no wifi. I did have hand-written directions to the hostel from the train station; that should be enough, right?

No. This city is a maze. I followed the directions to the letter (I think they were actually mistranslated from the Italian) and ended up beside a remote bar with no-one around other than the proprietor. He was about seventy with well-weathered skin, clearly native to this place, and smoking a cigarette in the sun.

I asked him, "Do you know this hostel?"

He said no; we looked at the incomprehensible directions for a while. Apparently the address was nearby so I wasn't too far off. He offered to call the hostel owner. I gave him the number and he laboriously punched it into his phone; mistyped, tried again.

A conversation in Italian. He hung up. "I spoke with the girl," he said, which I took to mean a woman under the age of 60. "She is waiting for other customer on bridge right now. You go that way, then that way, then left, I mean right, and you find three bridges that join. She meet you at top of bridge."

I thanked him profusely, and his directions were good, so I found what I later learned is called the Fondamenta Tre Ponti, a.k.a. bridge of three points I guess:

It's actually more like five bridges joining together (it's the meeting point of five canals), but there are three main ones. And I did meet the hostel owner there, and she was about 50 years old. I followed her to the hostel, ate, then slept for twelve hours.