Time travel: Venice, 2005

Back in the days before smartphones and easy sharing, even digital pictures took forever to transfer and convert to a web-friendly format, and film was just a headache to digitise. Even with the few I posted when Facebook appeared, all the pictures I took stayed in my archives, like buried treasure.

San Giorgio Maggiore (under maintenance)

Nearly a decade before wonder | wander | women, I went on a trip to Italy with my cousins. We had just stepped out of the train station and got our first good look at Venice. 

Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute

I grabbed my cousin and insisted that even though we'd just arrived, we needed to leave again right away. "Right NOW!" He was so confused. "Why?"

"Because if we stay too long, I'm afraid I'll never want to go back."

Friends told us that it would be crowded, especially in summer; that the canals would be smelly and the streets too hot to walk around and the pigeons were out of control.

Piazza San Marco

The pigeons were picturesque, the canals were pretty and non-odorous, and there was plenty of room for everyone. And the city was gorgeous.

Ponte dei Sospiri

We did all the touristy things: we rode the gondolas, visited glassblowers, took our pictures in the piazza. 

Basilica di San Marco

More than that though, we had fun together. We were three young people without parental supervision wandering around an international hotspot. 

We walked for hours. We ate four scoops of gelato a day. We sat by the gondolas at midnight listening to the church bells ring over a jazz festival. 

It was the essential college experience: after a gruelling week of exams, we felt rich in time and new experiences. We were happy and grateful to be together in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Arsenale

We're not the same people we were then, and Venice now seems very far away. But we hope that soon we can have gelato together in a sunny place, and make more memories with family.