Luca from the hostel gave me a ride to the train station since he was picking someone else up that morning. My train didn't leave until 12:30, but due to the limited Sunday rail schedule I had to leave much earlier than that to be in Rome with enough time to catch the train. I sat around for about an hour waiting for the train and adding to the blog. It was a pretty nice train, though this annoying Indian guy sitting next to me kept trying to play Bollywood movies really loudly from his phone. I'd glare at him until he stopped, but then half an hour later he'd give it another go and I'd have to stare him down again. I really don't know how people don't have a pair of earbuds in this day and age. The train between Rome and Bologna was extremely fast, though it dropped back down to more familiar speeds once we got close to Venice. I also discovered that, since this train required a reservation, showing the woman who checked my ticket the reservation substituted for actually showing her my rail pass. As such, I never activated a day of the rail pass and have conserved one of my uses. It's since occurred to me that I actually am running out of time to use all of them. I think I have 3.5 weeks left on it, and in that time I'll need to use 7 travel days. That shouldn't be too hard, but I've been extremely conservative with them thus far and I guess I shouldn't have been. The busses are just so cheap and often have much better luggage storage than the trains, and even though the trains are usually faster, I'm not exactly pressed for time and often find myself valuing the downtime provided by the long bus rides. I guess I'll swear off busses for the time being, though I think my Ljubljana trip will be by bus since there don't seem to be any direct trains from Venice. It's actually much faster to bus there as a result.

I got in around 4:30 and walked a few hundred feet to the hostel. It's nice, and quite similar to the ones I stayed at in Hamburg and Geneva (part of the same chain). My hostel is technically in Venice, but it's on the mainland and doesn't even slightly resemble what people think of when they think of Venice. It's like telling someone you're from NYC when you're really from Staten Island. There's a huge cluster of large hostels and hotels, including mine, grouped right around the train station that hops over to the island. It's clear that nobody really wants to be spending time on this side of the lagoon. I went out to meet some very friendly Brazilian women from hostelworld and explore the mainland section of the city since we neither fancied hassling with the train nor paying whatever extortionate prices the island would charge. We talked for a while and got some very reasonably priced drinks. The mainland isn't very attractive, but if you can look past the gross industrial areas and the port it's ok. Fairly modern and clearly relatively recently developed, but not that exciting. I made plans to see the Brazilians on the island the following day, and we went to try and get an early night in to maximize our time out tomorrow. Like me, they only intend to spend one full day on the island.

I intend to leave early on Tuesday morning since there's really nothing else for me here in Venice. I honestly have no idea what's in Ljubljana either, but it's probably more interesting than the Venetian mainland. I think Slovenia is the first country I'm visiting that's really largely unknown to me, so I'm very curious to see what I find.