Until wednesday, my best view of Venice had been the opening chase scene in the Italian Job. Now since I have seen the city, I can't imagine how they ever filmed that movie! There are literally gondolas everywhere!
Venice is a place that I wish I could bring everyone to, especially the Craigville crew. Everything is done by boat. There are taxi boats, police car boats, postal boats and huge ferries to bring people around the grand canal and find their respective hotels.
We arrived at Venice Mestre, the train station in modern, not filled with water section of Venice, around 11am on Wednesday. Luckily, our hotel (yes, we are staying in style now) was located about a seven minute walk from the station. We have accumulated a lot more stuff in the past two weeks! We checked in, changed and departed for historical Venice.
To get there, you have to take a train or a bus over the bridge for 1€. It takes about ten minutes and when you step out of the Venezia Santa Lucia station, you are on the grand canal. It was sunny and blue skies the minute we got there and just beautiful. I think we took a combined 200 pictures on the first day. We wandered through the narrow streets and alleyways, and around several bridges to the Ponte Rialto. This is the famous bridge of Venice and is crowded with shops on either side and tons of tourists. There is murano glass everywhere! There were gorgeous mirrors, necklaces, frames, light fixtures... You literally want to buy everything. However, backpacking limits the purchasing of breakables, so I only purchased one gift... For Tree!
Next we walked through more winding parts of Venice. Thankfully there are tourist proof signs everywhere pointing you to the important sights. We reached the Piazza San Marco, which is huge. It's the famous piazza with all the pigeons. One guy was lying on the ground covered in bits of bread and pigeons. He has a piece of pretzel sticking out of his mouth for pigeons to nibble on. It was disgusting. Personally, the pigeons here freak me out. They fly at eye level and you always feel like you are going to get knocked out by one. Those coupled with the stray dogs are going to cut ten years off my life.
As usual, we purchased a gelato and enjoyed it sitting in the Piazza, on the outskirts, far away from the pigeons. The basillica of St. Mark's is in the Piazza and it's beautiful. It is enormous much like the other ones and it still very white with smaller more detailed figurines on the outside. Surrounding the Piazza are several upscale restaurants, each one has a small orchestra playing. Seriously, a violinist, a cellist, a pianist etc. So lovely music floats through the area.
Next we walked along the Bay of St. mark's. There are two other islands off the coast of Venice and we could see one from there. We sat along the wall's edge and I put my legs in the water, which was surprisingly cleaner than I thought. However, I did manage to soak my skirt which was bummer. We walked along the bay for awhile and decided to return to the hotel. Somehow, we took a wrong turn and ended up in Piazza St. Campo. We looked for this place on the map for fifteen minutes, until we realized it was on the very edge and we were about to drop off Venice into the water. We had literally walk the entire city of Venice, and now we had to get back. I don't know how people there do it. It's so confusing! Luckily, there are no cars or Vespas so we had no chance of getting hit as we wandered aimlessly back to the train station.
That night, after a hearty meal of salami, chicken, bread, olives, tomato and mozzarella, our roommates arrived. They happened to be from Uruguay and we were speaking spanish. Well, they were slurring Spanish and I was trying to conjugate verbs. I think I need to practice before I hit Spain in October! Needless to say, Alyssia was quite amused.
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