This past weekend we went to Venice (that’s why there haven’t been new posts). It was gorgeous! it’s like a bunch of tiny, ancient city neighborhoods separated by canals, some as wide as a sidewalk and others the size of a four-lane street. There are little stone and marble footbridges with steps that cross the water, and a whole system of vaporettos–little ferries that run in all directions on about 35 routes just like a city bus system, but much more frequent. We went to the Rialto, a picturesque marble bridge that crosses the Grand Canal, and St. Mark’s Square, a huge piazza with St. Mark’s Basilica at one end, at least one 5-piece orchestra playing all the time, and about 80 million pigeons. I think Andrew is developing a pigeon problem, because the longer we stayed there the more he kept threatening to punch them out of the air if they came too close, haha. (These are not like normal pigeons. The tourists feed them all the time, and they don’t move out of your way on the sidewalk and fly right past your face and hit you with their wings when you pass. They should hand out brooms at the edges of the piazza to help fend them off.) We also rode the vaporetto over to Murano, a little neighboring island where they make the famous Venetian glass. We watched a glass blowing demonstration where a guy pulled a blob of hot glass out of a kiln and made a handled vase and a horse statue and wandered around the tons of shops selling glass beads, jewelry, serving pieces, frames, mirrors, figurines, chandeliers, vases, ashtrays, etc. There were even a some giant glass sculptures in the piazzas to advertise a local glass museum exhibit. The streets in Venice were all like tiny alleys, and none of them were straight. You could say we got lost a few times, but we never really knew where we were in the first place…it was more like we just kept walking and eventually came out to one of the landmarks and found out where we had been going.
