When I was a junior in college I studied abroad in Florence.  Over the weekends, we would often travel to different parts of Italy - sometimes official trips and sometimes just in packs.  The weekend of my 21st birthday a group of friends and I went to Venice.  We wandered around the canals, drank lots of wine, and ended up on the Piazza San Marco (or St. Mark's Square) on our first evening.  Now, Venice can be kind of a pricey place, but the area around St. Mark's is super expensive.  Especially when you're a student on a budget.  So instead of sitting at one of the sidewalk cafés and having a glass of wine, we brought our own bottle and parked ourselves withing listening distance of one of the groups of musicians.  We sat on the ground, lounging and toasting ourselves on our good fortune.

The next day, we returned to St. Mark's Square on our way somewhere else.  What we found was totally appalling.  The ground on which we sat so innocently the night before was amass with pigeons and completely covered in pigeon poop.  Despite the shower I had taken that morning, I almost couldn't even eat that day knowing that my hands had been completely covered in pigeon droppings only the night before.  And that if I were to ingest any pigeon poop, surely blindness would follow.

Yesterday I got this picture from my friend Sevda who visited Venice and St. Mark's Square over the weekend.

That's right.  THE PIGEON IS ON HER HAND.  AND SHE'S LAUGHING.  If this same picture would have been taken of me, you can bet the next thing you'd read would be my obituary.  Unless of course the hotties from the Italian Rescue Squad had been able to revive my heart.  And I sure hope someone would have had the good sense to take a picture of that.