Venice

We left Cinque Terre very early in the morning, and took the train through La Spezia, Pisa, and Florence on our way to Venice. In the Pisa train station, we took the obligatory photo of Jer holding up the... Pisa train station sign. 

We reached Venice at 2:00. Stepping out of the train station in Venice really is like stepping into another world. We walked over beautiful bridges and down narrow streets to reach Hotel Henry, where I had booked the cheapest possible accommodation in Venice. When we reached our room, we had to take a photo of its rather hilarious size. There was no furniture beyond two tiny beds in a room so small that Jeremy could actually lie down across the two beds with his head touching one wall and his feet against the opposite wall.

There was major construction going on one floor above our tiny room, and with all the hammering, the plaster from the ceiling started to fall. The hotel had tacked up some plastic sheeting on the ceiling to catch the falling plaster, but there was far too much falling plaster for the sheeting to hold, and we soon found that our room rained plaster. The dust was covering everything, and it was actually rather scary with the falling ceiling and loud hammering, so Jeremy informed the lady at the front desk. She seemed fairly complaisant and uninspired to improve the situation, so I joined Jeremy and with my most serious teacher face. After a bit of discussion, we were given a beautiful well-furnished and spacious room with queen bed and en suite. In the end, Hotel Henry ended up being a lovely place to stay for a very low cost!

We spent our first afternoon and evening in Venice exploring!  I was in pursuit of the snail staircase, a famous but also infamously hard-to-find piece of unique Venetian architecture. But we were also happy to take our time and wander over any bridge that looked interesting. After considerable effort and challenges using google maps (GPS doesn’t work when you are in a meter-wide alley between very tall buildings), we found the snail staircase! I had hoped only to see it, but we learned that you can also walk up it too. Another family was there already, so we overheard them asking how much it cost to walk up the staircase. It was 7 euros per person! So we looked at it for free.  

For dinner, we found a cute place called “We Love Italy” that sold reasonably-priced fresh pasta for take-out. Just down the street was a little windowsill that overlooked the canal. So we ate our delicious pasta and watched the gondolas go by. We ended our day walking north from Hotel Henry, crossing beautiful canals as the sun set behind them. We reached a vaporetto dock (the boat version of a city bus), and we watched the sunset while reading.

On our second day, we walked the long way towards San Marco, going past the bus station to buy our tickets to the airport for the next day. We stopped at a fabulous café for breakfast which had fantastic pastries. We enjoyed breakfast so much that we bought another pear and chocolate pastry to go.

After a few hours, our meander ended in the San Marco square at 11am. We had booked a tour of the Doge’s palace and San Marco. The guide was a little rough around the edges, but it was a very interesting tour. The Doge’s palace was full of art – much of it by Tintoretti. One painting was the largest canvas in Europe – it covered an entire wall and showed people raised to life in paradise. They had created it by sewing together three canvases.

We crossed into San Marco’s cathedral walking over a makeshift bridge as a little bit of the square in front of the church was flooded. It is a very unique cathedral. I remember my architecture prof describing it as a basket of oranges because it is all domes! It is shaped unusually like an addition sign instead of the elongated cross of gothic churches. The onion domes clearly show the eastern influence on Venetian architecture, caused by the trade route which made the Venetians so wealthy. The ceiling is all mosaics. The background of every mosaic is gold, created by sandwiching a piece of gold leaf between two pieces of glass. In total, our guide told us that the ceiling contains 60 000 square feet of gold leaf.

After refilling our water bottle at one of the fabulous taps in the city, we boarded a boat for Murano. The museum we went to did a glass-blowing demonstration and then showed us to a gallery of insanely expensive glass sculptures. We were rather afraid to breathe lest we break something.

After taking the boat back to Venice, we wandered east in the city and found an armoury which, while having decorative historical-looking gates, also appeared to be very much still in use. We ate at a little diner, and then found a nice spot to sit on the edge of a canal. We half-read and half enjoyed watching the gondolas go by. People watching on the side of a canal is pretty great. There was the awkward couple who we decided were each wondering what they had got themselves into; three laid-back guys eating calzones contrasted with a dressed-up lady drinking champagne; a gondolier trying so hard to tell interesting stories to a family who couldn’t possibly look more disinterested and bored; a newly married couple in their lovely wedding clothes; two gondoliers coordinating their boats to be close enough to pass a cigarette from one gondolier to the other, and so many others.

When we finally got home, we set the alarms for 5:40am and fell into bed. Our journey to the bus station was quite pretty as the streets were mostly empty and the sun was rising over the grand canal.