Sunday, September 25, 2011

Venice!

Raelene here...We arrived in Venice at noon. After figuring out how the water bus transit works, asking the information people what stop we would need, and getting a pass for the next 36 hours, we made our way to our hotel. The water bus motored us to our Ca d'Oro stop/dock. I like being on the water and was immediately enchanted by the place.
The streets or passageways between buildings are narrow and a little labyrinth-like if they are not straight through to a canal. It was an adventure finding the entrance to our hotel. Later, as we were exploring the neighbourhood, we saw the same street name as the one for our hotel on a parallel street a few streets down! There is not much room for signs in these walking streets that can sometimes be more narrow than hallways in some people's houses I've been in. We found our hotel and checked in to the cute little hotel room, dropped our bags and headed out to explore.

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First stop was San Marco, St. Mark's Square. We wandered through this area, stopping for gelati and going over a few canal bridges and by the water ambulance boats, and headed across to the other side of the island.

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San Marco

We hopped another water bus to Murano, an island famous for glass work. Unfortunately, at this time late on a Sunday afternoon, we didn't spot any demonstrations of the craftspeople working with glass but were able to admire the glass sculptures and objects in the shop windows.

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Murano sculpture across the bridge

We wandered down some side streets seeing pomegranate trees and finding a dead end or two, then tracing our steps back, we hopped another water bus and rode it around the island at sunset until we reached San Marco again.

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They had different classic musical playing groups taking turns at the different outdoor cafes there. We had been warned to not order a cappuccino in the square here since it apparently will lighten a person's wallet by 18€. We headed by water bus back to our hotel to look for more affordable dining and found a nice little place with an outdoor patio where Doug had some salmon and I had spaghetti. We were ready to call it a day.

Link to brief video clip of groups playing

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