Days TWENTY FIVE & TWENTY SIX

So while I technically did pass through Austria and visited Vienna, I don't really remember it. On the train from Prague I must have caught the tail end of Tyler's food poisoning or something similar ( I feel totally comfortable blaming the hostel for any illness I may have contracted) and spent the first day in bed at the Meininger Hostel (a chain I would recommend) throwing up and generally dead to the world. On the second day we made it to the Natural History Museum, which was pretty groovy. Then we played some pool, drank some cheap Becks - because beer is the traveller's medicine - and were off the Italy the very next day...

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Day TWENTY SEVEN

After a nine hour train ride where I spent most of my time passed out (thanks for the drugs C) we got to Venice! Finding our accommodation took all our concentration, and it was straight to sleep.

... the next day Tyler decided he was actually a lot sicker than he first thought, and we went to the hospital. After the strangely terrifying and post apocalyptic experience that was finding the emergency room, he had to stay put with a drip in his arm, and I went off in search of food.

Wait, did I say strangely post apocalyptic experience? Ok, I can explain...

After following the beautiful little pathways around the canals with Tyler barely able to walk, we got to the point on google maps where it said the hospital was. We walked around the outside of the building, but there doesn't seem to be a way in...

^ the front of the hospital

We spotted two moored water ambulances, and see a door next to them, so we go in...

There is a hallway running parallel with the facade of the building with small closed doors running off it, and not a person in sight. Um... are we in the right place? We walk to another set of doors at random, and go through. We are in an inner courtyard filled with trees and old water fountains. There is nothing but silence. Echoing, empty, over-grown silence. There were some modern signs on white plastic boards that were written in Italian, but of course we didn't know what they said. there were arrows on the signs, so we followed them and founded ourselves at a dead end in an upstairs disused and dusty crumbling brick corridor. By this time I was finding it hard to keep telling Tyler that it would be ok and we were about to stumble upon a doctor at any moment. With no other option, we retraced our steps to the first door in the long corridor, and from this new angle we saw a modern ramp leading though the courtyard. This ramp looked a bit like the entrance to a construction site, plastic wrap and all. Glimpsing someone in what looked like hospital scrubs, we went down the tunnel deeper into the heart of the building, and thank. bloody. god. found a bigger room with four walls and a solid roof, and most importantly a nurse! The happiest I've ever been to see a hospital waiting room!