Italy: Day 8, Part 1

Hello Venice!!!

Well, not actually Venice, but we are going to Venice today. Our hotel was not actually in Venice, but in a close-by small city. Know what that meant? No street noise, no bright lights, no drunken revelers or delivery trucks. It was like a quiet paradise.

I think I left out the best part. I mean, parts.

 

 Know what that is? A shower.  A real-life, fully enclosed, shower.  No drain in the middle of the floor. No flimsy curtain. Completely self-contained and completely amazing. Again, there were the two types of toilets, but I didn't care about that at all. I was thrilled with the real shower. 

And then, 

 

Know what that is? A bed. A queen-sized bed. Not two twin beds pushed together, but a real bed. A big bed. With feather pillows.

Oh, and there was air-conditioning!!!! I know, we might have been in Heaven.  And then, we went to sleep and woke up to eat breakfast. With scrambled eggs and (Canadian) bacon. And fruit. And cheese.  Amazing. Best breakfast all trip, hands down.

Because we weren't staying in Venice, we had to hop on the train to get into the city. Here I am, looking cool.

Once we made it to Venice, we had to get on a boat to get to the other side of the city where the gotta-see sights were located. We didn't really care about touring the Jewish neighborhoods.

From the train station, we had to walk to meet our boat.

Our pond-hopper boat to Venice

Seems like the Port of Venice should have a little more demure sign. I mean, it ain't that fancy.

We did want to see St. Mark's Square (Piazza San Marco) and the Rialto Markets so we skipped out on the group (not included in the trip price) tour and ventured out on our own, with the occasional Rick Steves supplement.

The above picture is the clock tower in St. Mark's Square that is connected with St. Mark's basilica. See FB for pictures of the basilica. The blue circular section is not ringed with numbers, but with zodiac signs. That ball in the middle of it shows the position of the moon. Just above that circle, is the hour and minute - again, in blue. You can see an X and the numbers "25." It was 10:25 a.m. when that picture was taken, or there abouts. The minute hand only changes every five minutes. I know, Roman numerals in Italy, who would have thought it?  Further up is the winged lion which is the symbol of Venice. At the tip top is the bell. On either side of the bell are human-shaped robots that bang their metal hammers on the bell to toll the time. I believe, but don't remember the source, that the first death by robot happened up there when an inattentive worker was knocked off balance by the swinging of one of the robots' arms. I can't cite my source though, so it may be false.

The Square is marked by huge pillars with the winged lions on them. It seems that Venice wanted all the ships at sea to be able to pick out Venice from the string of islands on Italy's coast.

After we saw what we wanted to see in St. Mark's Square, we headed out towards the Rialto Market. There were tons of old signs pointing the way. I wish I would have taken some pictures of them. It was like a scavenger hunt, you never knew where the signs would be.  Along the way, we were almost killed by several delivery men. There are no cars allowed in the city so goods and food had to be boated in and then trucked by hand through the city (read that as "little narrow alleyways filled with people). The delivery men would use hand trucks and loud, annoyed shouts to announce his presence. I didn't care for that at all, but it was fun to see their frustration.

And, of course, we got to see gondolas and their drivers with the cute little hats. We thought about taking a gondola ride, but when Matt inquired as to the cost and was informed that it would be about $137 bucks, we opted to skip the gondola for the twenty dollar public waterbus that we would have to use later in the day. I wasn't disappointed and don't really think Matt was either. We had lots of time on the water that day and those gondoliers looked rather shady.

Eventually, we made our way to the Rialto Market. Oh my goodness. Words cannot describe the produce we saw. Here's just a sampling of pictures:

The strawberries especially looked divine. I am a major strawberry lover, but Matt is not. I mentioned how I wanted them several times, but he, the bearer of the euros, never got my hints (until later that day).

After the produce market, we hit up the fish market. Again, pictures:

The market had every kind of seafood imaginable. There was a fishy smell, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it would become after the seafood was taken away and the heat of the day came. We got to experience that later.

Seeing all that beautiful food was making us hungry. Matt wanted to go to a little place that he had read about before we left the good ol' U.S. of A. I don't recall the name, but after an hour of searching, we finally found it. The menu was written in Italian and just outside the door. We quickly learned that they were very proud of their food and didn't take credit cards. We didn't want to have to get more euros and had already spent a fair portion of our budget for the trip. I talked Matt out of eating there and we headed back out to the streets to look for cheaper fare. We came to a McDonalds. I asked if we could eat there. Matt said no. I burst into tears in the middle of the street with dozens of small schoolchildren watching me cry. You would have thought that he just told me that my dog died. You see, I was hungry/poor/sad/angry.  I wanted to spend three euros on strawberries, but I couldn't have them. I wanted to eat, but didn't want to spend money. I wanted to do something I wanted to do, and not just everything that Matt wanted to do. Eventually, Matt realized that all he would have to do to appease me was to agree to have lunch at McDonalds. (To this day, he still knows that I can be won over with McDonalds french fries) He shuffled me inside, suggested I make use of the water closet, and bought me a Big Mac. I love that man.

After getting over my hunger-induced outburst, we went back to the market and bought some strawberries. Then, we caught the waterbus to Murano. But I'll tell you all about that tomorrow.