Venezia

After Switzerland came Italy, we started the Italy leg of our trip with Venice.  We spent pretty much all of Sunday on trains from Lauterbrunnen to Venice.  Mind you this was the Sunday right before Christmas, so the trains were packed and the stations were absolute madhouses.  On our first train, lots of people had to stand for hours because all the seats were taken.  We arrived in Venice around 8 PM; long after the sun had gone down. Luckily we had our GPS. It took us nearly 45 minutes to reach our hotel by foot (*cough*, budget travellers) and it involved lots of twists and turns through alleyways and LOTS of bridges (all of which involve climbing stairs to cross). I'm 99% sure we NEVER would've found our hotel without that GPS! To add to the fun of walking around Venice with luggage, one of the wheels went out on our big suitcase, so poor Spencer dragged 50 pounds of luggage across Venice without the use of functioning wheels. Stay tuned to find out more about that issue. Our hotel in Venice was decent; the best part was the toilet, which was literally in the shower (see the picture near the bottom, you may even notice the soggy toilet paper because I forgot to take the TP out before I showered).

Our guidebook said that Venice does this slightly disappointing thing of being exactly what you expect it to be. This is kinda true, there really are canals everywhere with boats and gondolas and absolutely no cars (the streets are far too narrow). There are beautiful arched bridges everywhere. All the streets are made of stone, no cement or asphalt here! Many of the houses are brightly stuccoed with wooden shutters and flower boxes, and they hang their laundry to dry on lines zig zagging over the streets. The interesting thing about Venice is it has very few major "must-see sights"; you come to see Venice itself, as a city.

St. Mark's Square & Doge's Palace

The view from the Rialto Bridge, it was pretty foggy while we were here.

Monday we spent the day just wandering through the streets trying to "get lost" as all the guides suggest. We found some beautiful areas away from all the other tourists by doing this, and that's where we got some of our best pictures and saw where the locals live.  For lunch we got some street vendor pizza and gelato, which was way tastier than the “Italian food” we'd had the night before.  I put this in quotes because every sit-down meal we had in Venice was a sorry excuse for Italian food. 

Venice and its islands have an insane amount of churches: 149 to be exact.

Kids playing soccer

 Another interesting thing about Venice is it's a true island (which you probably know), but what you may not know is there are actually lots of other little islands in the area called the Venetian islands. So Tuesday, Christmas Eve, we (sort of) escaped the crowds and rode a waterbus to two of those Venetian islands. The first was the island of Murano. Murano is famous for their glass blowing, so we walked by tons of shops with all their trinkets on display. They had some really pretty vases and dishes, but they're pretty expensive and made of glass...so we didn’t think they’d make practical souvenirs. Maybe someday we'll go back when we're rich and we can just ship them home ;). After Murano, we went to an island called Burano. The people of Burano are famous for making lace and having brightly colored houses (we're talking lime green, fuchsia, and dandelion yellow). They say the houses were painted bright so the fishermen could find their home at the end of the day.  Now of course it's just to look pretty and suck in the tourists.  We wandered around, took some great pictures, ate our PB&J in the park, then headed back to our hotel for naps because we were going to be up late for midnight mass.

Some of the glass work in Murano, I wish we had better pictures of this.

Burano

I'm seriously in love with colorful houses.  I wish they were a thing in America.

Top: This strange group of people dressed in all black walked around singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve, they were really entertaining.  It was also a little funny to hear them sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas", I'll bet they don't get a lot of those.  Bottom: The Asians loved taking pictures of the pigeons, so I took a picture of the Asians taking pictures of pigeons....

By the time we went to get dinner, pretty much everything had closed down for Christmas Eve.  We found one shop that was open and bought a calzone to share.  We sat outside in one of the ten empty tables to eat it.  Before we could finish eating, the shop owner came out and told us we had not paid the "sit-down fee".  Then she clapped her hands and yelled “Ciao! Ciao!” at us like we were some pesky dogs.  We left with our tails between our legs.  The problem was we were still really hungry.  We walked to McDonalds to get some food and even that was closed! On our way back to the hotel, we found a little sit-down food restaurant that was open, and decided to eat there.  The restaurant was playing some classic, American Christmas music, had some cheap tinsel hanging around the shop, and the employees were wearing little Santa hats.  It felt like that scene in the Santa Clause when they burn the turkey and eat at Denny's.  When our dinner came out, it tasted pretty cheap and crappy.  To make matters worse, the bill was over $50!  They'd charged us $7.50 (5 Euros) per CAN of Coke…. and we both got one because they told us they didn’t have tap water!  We were pretty ticked when the bill came out.  After dinner, we went to St. Mark’s square to attend midnight mass in St. Marco’s Basilica.  It’s cool to say we attended mass in Venice, but we understood absolutely nothing from the service, so it didn’t put me in the Christmas mood like I’d hoped.

Dinner round 1: Our calzone for dinner (note all the closed shops behind Spen, this was normally a bustling street)

Dinner round 2: Doesn't that pasta just look gourmet? And check out those decorations ;)

The line for mass and some details from inside.  Apparently it's pretty rare to see the ceiling with lights on it.  The entire ceiling is made of little mosaic tiles! Crazy!

Venice was fabulous.  It was absolutely beautiful and was everything I’d envisioned.  There were two things that I really hated though.  First, I was sick of the people smoking everywhere!! I thought the people in London smoked like chimneys but it was NOTHING compared with the Italians!! It is pretty much inevitable you're going to walk behind smokers everywhere you go here. They smoke in the train stations, over their product in the market, and in the lobby of our hotel. Call me a Utahn, but there’s something about walking around in an endless stream of people, with cigarette smoke in every direction that starts to grind on your nerves.  The other highly obnoxious thing about Venice is the dogs. Everyone seems to have a dog, which is fine. The problem is there is no grass anywhere, and dogs have to poop. So, the dogs do it in the walkways. And the norm here is to pretend you don't see your dog doing it and keep walking. So we had to watch our step everywhere we went to avoid all the stupid puppy poo.  On that happy note, I’ll end this post.  Next time, Florence. 

Here's the picture of the toilet in the shower as promised.  You didn't believe me did you?

But really, Venice is awesome.