My Defining Decade: "Someday a man will look at me like I look at cannolis"

Today was mostly a travel day from Modena to Venice! Besides being the large group of Americans lugging hundreds of pounds of stuff behind us, it was fairly uneventful. No train line standoffs this time! The hardest part of the trip was walking from the train station to our hotel in Venice. There isn't enough room for cars to drive on roads here, so most of the transportation is by foot (or water if you want to pay a water taxi. But even that only gets you so far). Our group hauled all of our luggage 0.8 miles in Venice to our hotel through narrow and uneven streets. My arms sure got a workout! It took us about 30 minutes to get to the hotel, so once we arrived, we were so excited it has air conditioning! It's the little things.
We got a short break before heading out again, this time to see the Murano Glass Production Factory. Murano is the name of a series of islands in the larger city of Venice and is known for their glass making. If you want to be wowed by handmade glass chandeliers, I highly suggest looking them up! Seriously it's amazing. I found it really interesting that to make colored glass, you add different components to it. You use amethyst to make purple, cobalt to make blue, and liquid gold to make red! The demonstration was fairly short but really cool! Then we had the opportunity to shop their official merchandise and I ended up getting a couple of really cool things from there!
From there, we found a nice restaurant to eat dinner. They're big on seafood here, and I'm really not but luckily it's Italy so pasta is always an option! I tried something different tonight - risotto primavera (vegetable risotto). It was decently good, but probably not the best thing I've had here. It was good to get some veggies in my diet (do Italians know about vegetables? They're so hard to find here!) I had a peach bellini to drink which is peach puree and Prosecco so it's light and fruity! It was really fun to try some new things and find a great drink!
After dinner, we walked around and found St. Mark's Basilica, the famous basilica in Venice! We're planning on going there for mass tomorrow if it works out. Afterwards, we found sicilian cannolis! They're basically a standard cannoli with a chocolate coating on the inside of the shell and a ricotta cream filling with chocolate chips. IT WAS SO GOOD!!! Allie pointed out that I was smiling and staring longingly at it while I was eating so I laughed and said, "someday a man will look at me like I look at cannolis." It's every Italian girls' dream. I broke the gelato-every-day trend today, but the cannoli more than made up for it. Here's to more delicious food for the last half of my trip!