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London

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(PRE-POST: We Also posted Venice today! Don't miss that one!) One last hurrah. We booked our flight out of London, so we spent one night there. Our flight was actually out of Gatwick Airport, which is a bit of a journey outside of London, so we stayed in a little town called Crawley where our Airbnb was 15 minutes door to door from the airport by train. Pretty much all we did in the town was eat lunch at a kebab place. The two men working there (different shifts…we stayed there for a while) were very friendly. They were Turkish, and knew their kebabs! They both (independently) asked what Monisha’s ethnicity was, noting that she looked like she could be part Turkish. Monisha’s been told in several of the countries we’ve been to that she looks like she could be from there. We Skyped Brian (Monisha’s dad) a few days before going to London, and he recommended we see a play in London if that sounded fun to us. He said the caliber of acting there is phenomenal, and his fr

Venice

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We’ve spent the past four days strolling through the winding, mysterious, wonderful streets of Venice. Looking over the canals from bridges.  Popping in cafes, pasticcerries, and osterias. Eating local Venetian cheese and fresh ricotta cheese from a meat and cheese shop. Strolling the marketplace. Seeking out the secrets hiding behind the walls of silent, narrow alleys away from the beaten path filled with tourists.    It’s quite astounding how quickly you can get from totally jam-packed broad streets that you can’t even walk at a normal pace through to totally empty corridors without another person in sight. That drastic of a transition happens in a matter of 10 seconds – you just turn off the main road, and it’s tourist free. Not everywhere, of course; there are some areas where most of the streets are quite touristy. But there huge portions of Venice that a peaceful, mysterious, and delightful. Whether or not you’ve noticed, you have b