NY/NJ drivers have nothing on the Italians....

So Saturday night was fun. I went to the local college bar area with a few people from the house fairly early in the night, which is actually when it is better here. We started to walk back just as the rest of the house was leaving and so of course we went back to show them a new bar we liked. All in all a fun night and it's nice to meet real Venetians.
Today I had to wake up early to finish some work and then just relaxed for the rest of the day. At 3:30 I left with 5 other people to meet Matteo, a waiter from a local bar (=coffeeshop in italy) we go to every day. Matteo is good friends with mallory our TA from when she spent a semester here. We took a traghetto over to Piazza San Marco. Essentially a traghetto is a gondola that crosses the grand canal at specific spots but only costs $.50 instead of the $100 a gondola ride costs.
After the traghetto we took a vaporetto (= water bus) to the main land. There we met up Frank, Matteo's friend and the 2 drove us their volleyball game. Now let me tell you a little something about italians...they're crazy. They like to pass people by swerving around in to oncoming traffic at fast speets. And when the do pass, they drive up to the car ahead of them at full speak until they're about 5 inches away before the pull into oncoming traffic...it was pretty fantastic.
Anyway, after the game/match? (which they dominated in) Matteo and Frank took all 6 of us out to dinner and drinks...and they paid! Dinner was delicous, they took us to a pizza place that was very authentic (we were definately the only group speaking english). My pizza had pomodoro, mozzeralla, stracchino, pomodorini and zucchini...it was delicious and big enough to have some left over for lunch tomorrow (a bonus for a girl on a budget).
A really fun night, and again fun to hangout with real venetians/italians.