Venice Carnival 2008

Carnival of Venice or Carnevale di Venezia - as Italians call it, is the place to be these days. This year I went there too!

A couple of days ago me and M. were going through our options on how to spend this last Saturday. One of our options was skiing. We were invited to join a group of friends on a skiing day-trip to Austria.

We almost agreed to go for it, when another option came up.

Four of our other friends were planning a photo trip to Venice. We were interested the moment we heard about it. After a short discussion we opted for this one.

We have both been to Venice before, so we kind of knew what to expect. However we (me especially) were a bit worried this time of year the city might be overrun with tourists from allover the world.



Some years ago, when we were there during the Carnival the streets were literally flooded with people. The human river just swallowed us and it was almost impossible to take a turn. If the crowd was going left, so were we.
You can imagine the nightmare when we tried to take photos. Taking a photo without at least some people in it was science fiction. That really is not my kind of thing.
Unfortunately that wasn't the end of it. It was a very cold day and the strong wind wasn't so nice either. As hours passed, the wind grew stronger and we were freezing.
It was definitely not something to hope for this year.

Luckily this year was nothing like that. All main events were scheduled for the next weekend, so I guess the majority of American and Japanese tourists are still waiting to catch a plain for Venice.
Even the weather was nice and sunny this year. The temperatures were somewhere around 11 degrees Celsius. Altogether it was a nice day in Venice. We were glad we went there again.



This will have to do for now. I will post again on this subject when I make it through a pile of photo material. And it's quite a pile!
Stay tuned for some more old canals and sparkling costumes.

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Trevalli Ski-opening official stats

For a couple of years now the official Dolomiti Superski homepage is offering some statistics for you to check out after you get back home.

I always try to remember and check them out. This year they upgraded the statistics with a graphical representation.



This is how a summary of my four days of skiing in Trevalli looks like. I noticed the numbers are a bit lower than usually. The reason for that is quite obvious from my previous two posts.
I posted a similar summary after my last year's skiing adventure in Civetta. You can check it out here.

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The hard part of skiing

Since in Trevalli there are no night skiing opportunities, we had to find something else to do during late hours.

It is quite usual for our group to cause some mild disturbance in an otherwise peaceful family vacation environment. This time however it was not the case.
There was this group of 18 men (aged 40 to 50) stationed in the same building with us and they were true party animals. We were no match for them. They said they do a thing like this twice a year. That's the only two times in a year their wives let them off the chain (so they put it). They seemed to try real hard to make the most of it.



They brought over 150 liters of alcohol with them. Mostly it was beer and wine, but there was also some home made schnapps, herb brandy, tangerine liqueur, walnut liqueur, blueberry brandy and I'm pretty sure that was not all. Personally I only managed to try those. I must say they were all homemade drinks and without an exception tasted pretty good.



They also had a pile of sausages, various dry salami and a whole leg of prosciutto with them. It all added up to a selection of meat products that I'm sure even a medium-size butchery would be proud of.

When they started to party you could barely hear yourself thinking. An accordion and a guitar encouraged them to sing louder and louder as the hours went by.
Fortunately they weren't in their best shape (or so they said), so they managed an all night party only every other night.

Surprisingly we saw them also on the slopes during the day. It was quite hard work for us too. Partying late and skiing all day long from 10 AM to 4 PM every day was quite a challenge.

They made me laugh every time I saw them. You could just never tell what they were up to. Of course they had their equipment with them on the slopes too (accordion included).

I am not sure how much skiing they actually did, because I saw them mostly around those neat mountain huts by the slopes.
Usually there are tables set in front of these huts. It feels really great to just sit there for a while and soak the sun. The only thing that spoils the idyllic atmosphere are the prices of food and drinks they offer. You could bring your own sandwiches and hot tea, but there are signs everywhere saying: "No picnic!" or "No packed lunch!".

If you try to ignore them, there is usually a waiter around to nag about it.



Well these neighbors of ours didn't seem to bother. They simply put their leg of prosciutto in a stand on one of the tables, just next to the 10 liter wine container they brought with them. They sang a song or two and slowly carved into the prosciutto with a 30 cm carving knife.

The waiter just pretended they weren't there and kept avoiding them. It was a laugh!
Oh yeah and the prosciutto was excellent!

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