Vicenza, Italy
Saturday, October 20, 2001
Got up @ 8:00 am. Two hours of sleep. The club was not the greatest of ideas. As newcomers to Italy, we always took advantage of the nightlife and sometimes took too much advantage. However, you need to live with your decisions and we decided to party before our weekend trip to
Vicenza and
Venice. So we sucked it up and got ready and was off of to the train. There was 6 of us going on the trip, but myself and duong were feeling pretty shitty that morning. The walk to the station was quite a struggle. We were behind the whole time. We luckily got a few hours of sleep on the train and thanks to some PBJ sandwiches from Antoinette and Megan, we were feeling a lot better. We arrived in
Vicenza and started to walk towards the central area. It always good to take time to walk in a new area, sometimes slower than you are usually accustomed to cause you can miss soo much if you walk too fast. We eventually got to a Toyo Ito exhibit. I never heard of the guy at the time but he's a very successful Japanese architect
. The exhibit was amazing and the style of his architecture wasn't more about pushing the envelope of unveiling the interiors within. As architects we were amused by the exhibit, but were also glad that our friends who were art history majors also enjoyed the exhibit. after the exhibit we decided to eat at Mcdonalds. It's really funny and weird that we decided to eat there because we came all the way to
Vicenza and we did the most american thing to do. Sad, but i would learn that we should never eat mcdonalds in other countries because it is a waste of an experience. I vowed to never eat there again even in the states.
so we continued walking until we hit ethe Olympic Theater (Teatro Olympico) by architect Andrea Palladio. It's an awesome theaterwith semi-circular layout of seating and his play with perspective was quite keen. but don't go to far into the stands when you go here cause the guard will yell at you as he did to me. Palladio pretty much owns
Vicenza, his name is everywhere, Palladio this Palladio that, Via Palladiao and the Palladiio Mall. His buildings are all over this city. The most amazing part of his style is the proportions and how perfectly balanced his buildings area.
We then returned to the Hotel after a long day of walking. We ended up going to a mall for dinner and the mall was a bit weird because for the first time, we felt like we were in the states again . The mall was similar to malls in the states. another reason why we felt we were in the states is because we actually watched some ESPN. It's crazy but things that are so common in the states are rarely found here in Italy. So most often when travelling you miss things because you don't have them. however it's vice versa when you return as well. that's the beauty of travelling.
