Agenda:
- A beautiful day in the most beautiful city
- Gondola ride
Venice was probably my favorite city to visit. It's gorgeous, it definitely feels European (although I can't exactly define what that is supposed to be), and it's colorful.
I went to San Marco, which is where St. Mark's Square is located, via water taxi. I was surprised at the waves, and had a hard time keeping my lunch down despite it only being a 5-10 minute ride. We had a quick orientation on all the buildings at St. Mark's including the Doge's Palace, the Byzantine style Basilica, and the different bell towers. One of them was undergoing construction and they put up posters of various famous towers/buildings until the project is completed and the Dell 'Orologio is restored. They are so creative to hide a building undergoing restoration in Europe. In France, they turned the Louis Vuitton store into an enormous briefcase and in Holland, one of the buildings was disguised as a present. It's quite cool. In Vancouver, they just leave buildings as a huge dump looking like a gaping hole in the middle of the street.
We viewed glass being made at a factory store. I think they were just trying to hard sell us to buy Murano glass wine sets for astronomical prices, but I wasn't that impressed having seen glass factories from Granville Island in Vancouver. We had some shopping time, and I had a ball buying up the city. There were gorgeous Venetian masks, large and small ranging from $3 to probably $100, Venetian fans, tons of glass jewelry and beads, glass goblets and serving ware, millifiore watches and pendants, rings, gold shops, and all sorts of other goodies. I won't say that things were very cheap but they were unique items you can't buy elsewhere.
In the afternoon, being an obvious tourist, we opted for a gondola ride. Each boat carries 4-6 people. It was a one hour ride and meandered through some quiet back alley ways and into the Grand Canal and the Rialto bridge. It wasn't a cheap ride (and strictly being a touristy thing to do), but to be fair, steering a gondola in 40 degree weather through narrow paths didn't exactly looked like easy money. Our guy refused to sing, saying he had a sore throat, which was an outright lie cause I know they are not supposed to sing (that would cost extra). He wasn't bad looking though, in his late twenties, nice scenery all around. lol.
A bit of last minute shopping before taking the water taxi back and spending the evening in Verona and the last night in Italy. It was sort of funny because Italy was never one of the countries that really excited me when I thought of going to Europe, but then it sort of grown on me and I would love to visit Venice again. Time to say arrivederci (for now)!
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