Honeymoon Trip Day 5 – Venice

You can see pictures from this day here.

We woke refreshed in Venice to a nice summer day. The sky was blue, and it wasn’t very hot at all. We plunged into the heart of the city to do some serious sightseeing, and I was snapping away with my camera at just about every canal we crossed.

We had seen most of the major sights except for the southern part of town, and when we finally figured out how to get there, we came into an open square and we were stunned. It was a huge open space for such a small cramped city. Dominating the square was St. Mark’s Cathedral, and the open space was surrounded by some very Roman architecture. The square was full of tourists and pigeons, in roughly the same numbers.

We waited in a short line to get into St. Mark’s, and were interested to see that they were turning people away that were wearing short shorts or sleeveless tops. Respect for God, apparently. We climbed to the top of the cathedral, but weren’t allowed to take pictures. We could go out on the balcony and take some pictures, though. The place was vast. The ceiling was painted gold, and there was some pretty amazing artwork everywhere you looked. They had religious artwork made entirely from small colored tiles, and the style was very vibrant – not your typical religious artwork. To get to the artifacts and to look around you had to pay six euros and walk through a souvenir store. Respect for God, apparently.

After looking through the square we caught a boat ride up the canal through the entire city. Up to this point, we had seen Venice from the streets and bridges overlooking the canals, but this was a chance to see the city from the water, which turned out to be an entirely new experience. We didn’t want to pay a hundred dollars an hour to ride a gondola, so the five euros each price of the water transit was much more our speed.

As we lined up to get on the boat, I noticed that there were lots of people trying to jockey around to the front of the line. Some people even walked around to the exit and tried to play stupid until the boat arrived so that they could jump on as people were getting off. Some people in the line caught them and told them to go back, but this was the first time I really noticed what became a trend among tourists during the trip – if you can sneak ahead, go for it.

Luckily we were near the front of the line, and with the experience of riding trains all her life Kuniko grabbed two great seats at the back of the boat for us – the best place to take pictures. The boat was off, and we started enjoying the entirely different scenery along the Grand Canal.

Venice is a sinking city. Sinking gradually, but it really is getting lower. You could see the water lapping at the top of staircases, and even some enormous pumps outside of some buildings as we went along. Some of the houses along the canal were only accessible by water, and there were even a few restaurants that had “parking” for boats right outside.

I took tons of pictures on the ride up the canal. It was a great trip, and I recommend it to anyone traveling to Venice.

We had a late lunch at a restaurant along one of the more touristy areas of town, and although the price and the food were good, the waiters were a little pushy and rude, and they even tried to pressure Kuniko into tipping. We decided to screw them for the tip and get out of there. That’ll probably only make them more pushy and rude next time, but still – come on. Be nice, and things will go your way.

We gathered up our gear, and headed to the train station to move on to the next destination – Florence. The whole trip we had been buying sodas whenever we were thirsty, and we stocked up again before the trip. We also bought some sandwiches for dinner to eat on the train. My soda turned out to be a weird one – I don’t know what flavor it was, but I couldn’t drink it.

Sodas were expensive in Europe. Everywhere you went you could buy sodas, but the prices varied wildly. If you were lucky enough to find them cold in a supermarket (usually they only had room temperature ones) they sold for about 1 Euro (about $1.30). If you bought it off a street vendor the price went to anywhere from 2 Euros to 4 Euros – that’s more than five dollars for a soda! We burned a lot of cash buying drinks and gelatos on the trip – if I was doing it all over again I would bring my own water along. It wouldn’t be cold, but it would be cheaper.

On the train to Florence we sat with a nice couple from America. Most of the Americans we bumped into on this trip were the loud, obnoxious kind, but these two were really cool people. They were in their early 50’s, and they were spending a month in Europe traveling around. We talked and talked and compared experiences. It was nice to have a positive experience with some Americans – and it made the time fly by much quicker.

We got into Florence after 9 p.m., and made our way to the hotel using our guidebook’s map. The way seemed simple enough, because the hotel was near a large cathedral. We walked along the busy streets, looking for a large cathedral, but the buildings were so tall and close together that we ended up having to consult the map quite a bit. Also the streets were full of vendors and party-goers – it was a wild night. There was trash everywhere from what looked like a parade, and we couldn’t understand very much of what was being said around us. It was a very “lost in a foreign country” feel that we both had, and so we were glad when we finally found a large cathedral.

Unfortunately, its position didn’t match up with the map, and after we walked a little more we turned a corner and stopped in our tracks. Now that’s a big cathedral. We had found the Duomo, and words can’t describe the size of this thing. It was hidden behind all the buildings, and so closely surrounded that you couldn’t back up and take a picture. As Kuniko said, it was so big that it was scary.

We walked around the frighteningly large cathedral and soon found the door to our hotel. It was a giant wooden door, with just a speaker and an array of buttons. We pushed the button for our hotel, but the revelry outside was too loud to hear any response. We finally got them to open the gate electronically, and then we stepped inside.

Inside the gate was a dark courtyard, so dark that we didn’t know if we were walking into a warehouse or a storage room. It was spooky. We used my mini-flashlight and found a staircase, and then we walked up the dark stairs until we found another door with the name of the hotel. We knocked there, and a nice young man opened the door and introduced himself. We led us up one more flight of stairs, and opened the door to show us to our room.

The next room was like a living room/waiting room. It was huge, with tall ceilings. Probably four times bigger than our apartment back in Japan. And this was just the waiting room. He led us down a hallway into another room that had a small staircase leading to a door halfway up the wall. We went inside and there was our room. It was big, too. The bedroom was about the size of our entire apartment back home. There were three beds, a double and two singles. It was nice, but uncomfortably large. The bathroom was clean and nice, so we unloaded our stuff and then slept with the lights on that night. On a whim I left open the shutters to our windows, and then we went to sleep. Another big day.


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