Day 2

           I got off the plane in Venice in a sleepy daze, slept maybe 4 hours total. First time in a totally foreign place. No idea where to go, what anyone was saying, or where I'm sleeping tonight.

           When I arrived in Italy I turned my phone on to discover I wouldn't have service at all for a month. This excited me, one thing I'd been looking forward to was trying to live without a safety net.
           Found the baggage carousel and discovered my backpack arrived open, with my jacket missing.
           I'd overpacked and it was a gift, so I didn't really care if I found it, but I talked to the lost and found dept. for a while until the woman there ran over to me with a large plastic bag and anxiously said "we're so sorry it's damaged!" I opened the bag to discover it was in exactly the same condition it'd been in when I left.

Too punk for Delta.
           I rode the local bus to Venice, looked out the window to marvel at how Godfather-ish everything looked. I'd checked Google Maps before I left and it said Lydia's hotel was 12 meters from the bus station, but when I got out of the bus I began an hour-long journey of asking strangers for directions, then used the phone card mom gave me to call the hotel and find out it was on the exact opposite side of Venice (6 km) from the bus station. I quickly regretted bringing all the clothes I had.
           All I'd wanted to do on this trip was wander, so my plan of doing no planning was good, but I had told Lydia I'd meet her and I hate being late.
           I'd originally intended not to take any scenery photos, but at St Mark's Basilica decided to take only terrible photos of my face with a barely-visible background everywhere I went:

That joke made me laugh a lot, shut up
Here is the first non-joke picture I took, a pigeon eating a dead bird in the square:

           Lydia's roommate wouldn't let me sleep there, and Lydia was tired so didn't feel like coming all the way to Padua (35 min north of Venice) which left me on my own on the train to Alfredo, the first person I'd ever met on couchsurfing.org
           I got out at the station and looked all over for a single guy who appeared to be looking for someone. I wished I'd known what he looked like. I wandered around for 30 min before I went into a bakery and asked "phone?" They pointed around the corner where I used the last $2 on the phonecard my mom had got me. Alfredo didn't understand much English and told me to "stay there" but didn't seem to know where I was.
           I realized "I have no way to contact the place I'm staying and I don't know anyone or the language." It was a little scary, but I forced myself not to panic and held onto Jeff Lewis's ideal of trustfalling into the arms of luck (or karma). As I walked all over, after waiting at the phone for a while, wishing I had his address or something written down, just as I was about to start to really freak out, I saw a middle aged man approach and say "Noah!" looking upset. He scolded me for not having a European mobile phone. I apologized and thanked him profusely but he still seemed upset. He walked me to his lonely, sad home. He said he looked for Lydia, too, or he'd have spotted me sooner. He made me a typical divorced-man dinner of pasta and store-bought sauce, then suggested we go to the museum. I was so loopy from sleepiness that nothing made sense at all besides going to bed, but I wanted to convince him I wasn't just using him for his room, so I agreed, and he took me on an incredibly long tour of Padua. I paid the 5 Euro entry fee for us both, wishing I'd brought him a gift from the US instead, but I'd never done this before.
           The museum was really pathetic, but included these hilarious statues made by the Etruscans in 700 BC:

           I said I was sleepy and wanted to go home, but he kept saying we should go to museums. He then showed me St Anthony's Cathedral, which is so beautiful and huge it makes St Mark's Basilica look like a shoebox filled with diarrhea.

Then he took me to a church he said was technically in Vatican City (though the rest of the surrounding area was Padua) so any time the cops are chasing someone through Padua they have to ask permission to enter if the criminal runs in there. He said Vatican City has its own prison where you get stuck if you break a law on their property somewhere. Right outside there is a fountain he told me everyone goes in after they get laid.
"What?"
"Yeah, after they get laid everyone jumps in, but the cops stopped this tradition."
           I laughed really hard until he said "I guess getting laid high school isn't such a big deal anymore anyway" and I realized he'd been saying "graduated" not "getting laid." His accent was tough to decipher. He also told me "Venice isn't a city, it's a museum." True, but it's an incredible one.
Around 11 pm he finally let me go home and sleep on his daughter's bed (she was staying at her mom's that night), which was basically a kitchen counter.
           At one point I heard him calling my name outside the curtain (used as a door) saying "it's after noon." I apologized for being so jetlagged that I slept 13 hours, he again seemed upset that I'd missed another chance to wander around with him. I checked email on his computer just long enough to discover I have a place to stay tonight (also in Padua), a friend of the only Italian I know, Davide! I thanked Alfredo and took this beautiful photo of Padua before I went back to Venice