May 23, 2009

VENICE, Italy - Hello from Venice, Italy! Leksi and Kaylie have managed to avoid blogging for the past three days. After a great amount of anticipation we finally arrived in the beautiful Venice, Italy, the country of pizza, pasta, and gelato. We started the day with a five-hour bus ride from Pula to Venice. No emergency stops had to take place on this trip. We checked into the hotel and shortly after we were on our way to the heart of Venice.

There was a team meeting before breaking off into our own groups. We were told that it is not helpful to use a map in the city of Venice even if you don't know where you know where you are going. The group was advised that if you use your good looks then you could get a cheaper gondola ride. Fabulous divas Camryn, Shelbey, Kelly, Steph, Bri, and Lauren used this tactic to boat through the water alleys of Venice, made famous in the movie The Italian Job.

The sequence of the shops was glass, gelato, pizza, glass, gelato, pizza... If you need a guide to finding the best gelato in Venice ask Coach Travis and Coach Sagula. Rumor has it that these two made seven trips, trying every flavor the world had to offer. But you didn't hear it from us since Coach Travis asked to keep it a secret. The glass was tempting to buy for the first couple hours, but after five hours of walking around we don't want to see glass for a very long time. Street purse venders lowered the price of the "original" designer purse from 120 to 15 euros and were willing to follow us all the way back to North Carolina just to sell us a single purse.

Our host Tim Kelly was right about us not making it after 8 pm. By the time we got to the bus we were all ready to go back and lay in our beds. But first, we had to have an amazing six-course family style Italian dinner and three-course dessert. After all these exciting activities we were no longer able to avoid blogging.

Kaylie "Munchkin" Gibson and Aleksandra "Leksi" Georgieva