Well, we’re in Rome, but there’s no WiFi, so the dry blogging continues!
On Tuesday we had a full day in Venice. We got up early and munched on the remainder of yesterday’s supper. Once that was all gone, we decided to check out and head to the beach. If you’re not familiar with Venice geography, as I wasn’t, then you should know that Venice is actually comprised of many different islands. The beach was on a different island, so we decided to take a bus over there! Here’s our bus:
The “buses” in Venice are actually boats. And so are the taxis. There are real busses and taxis that will drop off and pick up at the edge of the island, but there are no cars or land buses that drive around the island. All of the public transportation in Venice is boats.
We got our tickets and hopped on the water bus heading to Lido, the island with the beach. It had been raining earlier in the morning, so we thought that maybe it wouldn’t be very crowded. Well, it started raining just a bit on the way over there, so we figured it really wouldn’t be crowded! I was apparently super excited about this possibility!
The “bus” was still pretty crowded though. Lido must be popular.
Zoom zoom.
Remember how we were confused about how you’d do stuff on the canal side of you house, like paint? Well, it turns out that every service is just done via boat. Need a new tree? It comes via boat!
The boat ride also gave us views of some of the other islands that comprise Venice.
it also gave us views of the postal system.
Oh, I kid! That’s just garbage. Still, it’s funny to think that might be how they send letters.
We arrived on Lido and worked our way toward the beach. Joni was navigating us there, but I pulled us off onto an incorrect side street. She managed to get us back on track though! Soon enough we found ourselves on the beach… the completely deserted beach. I mean, there was no one out there.
OK, there was a life guard, but that was it. All the changing rooms were locked up, so I was out of luck on the swimming front, but Joni already had her suit on under her clothes and was all set to swim in the Adriatic.
After a little swimming, we marked the high point of the water with a rock and decided to walk along the beach a bit. The idea was that if we ended up coming back the same way, then we could see how much the water rose in the time we were gone. We walked along the beach and found areas that are covered at high tide, but leave little pools at low tide.
These areas were just teeming with life. We saw little schools of tiny fish, hermit crabs of varying sizes, and crabs… tons and tons of crabs.
Crabs are hard to photograph. And video!
The crabs were fun, but scary. They’re hard to spot, so you can dang near step on one before you even see them. At one point a wave washed one up on to my foot. Fortunately, it freaked out and side-scurried itself away from me. The more daring ones got them selves up on their back legs, faced us, and wiggled their claws a bit. Of course they did this while side scurrying away, but it’s the thought that counts.
The beach is a neat place, even the buildings are interesting.
I think that’s a hotel.
After walking along the beach and collecting all the shells we wanted, getting attacked by wild sea weed, and facing down crab after crab, we returned to our rock to discover that it was in about six inches of water. Not too shabby after just 45 minutes!
OK, that’s not a chronologically sound use of that photo. That was taken just after Joni got done swimming. It just seemed to fit here though. Kinda like this one:
We headed back into the main part of the island to see if we could get some lunch. We’d seen a Billa on the way to the beach, so we found that again and got some bread, cheese, and bananas. The stores in Venice are weird. The grocery store we were at last night had these, but when I saw them at Billa, I knew I needed to share.
See that black handle in the back? Yeah, that comes out like a handle on rolling luggage. People then just drag their basket all over the store. How weird is that?!
When we came out, it had started raining again. Clutching our foodstuffs, we walked over to the “bus” station to find a dry place to sit. This time I had to use “bus” because it was a station for both normal land busses and water busses.
During our lunch we watched the water busses come and go. They’ve really got their system down. Each boat has two people: one to drive and one to handle docking and helping people on/off. The guy that’s doing the docking flips a rope onto the floating docks they have as bus stations, ties it off, then opens a little gate to let people off and on. He also helps old ladies get on the boat. It’s pretty neat actually.
Afterwards, we walked around the island a bit, then had some tiramisu at a little cafe. It was nice to sit for a bit, but more importantly it was nice to use the bathroom! There was a public bathroom by the bus station, but they wanted 1.50 Euro. Most places in cities are maybe 50 cents. Stupid island. After the little bathroom/cake break, we caught a water bus back to the “main” island. This was when we discovered that you’re supposed to use the little cards we bought to validate before starting a journey. We didn’t realize this at the station we had left from because you could just walk right in. The station on Lido made you scan your ticket to open a little gate. Well, we accidentally “rode black”. That’s MJ Eurospeak for “illegally”.
Back on the big island, we decided to walk around a bit and see what there was to see. Venice is kind of a weird city. I guess that for me it was associated with being kinda a touristy fancy place, with the old style buildings and fashion and whatnot. Well, in reality Venice is kind of run down.
There are a lot of buildings that are in not that great of shape, graffiti everywhere, and tiny dark corridors that would make even me nervous. Not to say that it’s a dangerous or not fun place or anything, it’s just not quite and fancy as I imagined. It’s still neat to visit and see all the canal based stuff.
After some aimless wandering, Joni suggested that we head for San Marco. San Marco was supposed to have this big square. We immediately set off in search of the square. Luckily for us, the map the hostel had given us included several yellow roads that were more touristy oriented. That means full of shops to hock junk. We got on a yellow brick road… wait, wrong story. Anyway, we got on the road and walked through the little streets and looked at all the shops. It was pretty neat.
We didn’t stop at many places, but we did stop into a place that sold shaving stuff. We saw they had straight razors and we were curious. We were less curious after seeing the 80-350 Euro price tags. We went along and saw some nice churches and mask shops. Both of those require more description!
There were a bunch of churches along the way, but they all shared some odd dissimilarities as compared to the churches we’d seen thus far. The churches in Venice are very modest externally. Almost none of them have large bell towers and they are not ornately decorated. They just look like normal buildings with large front doors, peaked roofs, and large crosses on top.
The insides are still relatively modest, at least in terms of how much gold is used. A lot of churches we’ve seen have a ton of gold leaf all over everything. The Venice churches have many more paintings, but far less gold leaf. I guess that’s to be expected though. Italy is proud of their painters after all.
The mask shops are also a big part of venice. You know those masks they have at masquerade balls? Venice has a ton of those.
These things are available everywhere and range from cheap tiny masks to full size super masks. The full size ones can be worn on a face, much like a mask should be able to be worn, but are then way bigger. I think the largest was nearly a foot and a half across. It was a mask with huge hair all around it.
We did eventually make it to San Marco church and square. We were a bit surprised when we arrived though, because it was flooded! I should back up a bit. Part of the yellow road to San Marco included crossing one of the larger, more famous bridges in Venice. As we approached that bridge, we noticed the parts of the sidewalk next to the canal were flooded. Once we got up to the bridge, we found that a building next to it had flooded to the point where the ground floor must have had water in it. We saw little built up walkways leading into the building, so we figured that just happened at high tide every day.
When we arrived at San Marco and found that flooded, we assumed that it happened every day too, but once we looked at it a bit more closely, we think it was a fluke flood. The church was flooded on one side, the square was flooded in several areas, and several shops and restaurants were also flooded a bit. We saw a ton of people using the little bit of high ground as a walkway. This made it kind of hard to get into and out of the square, since there was this bottleneck.
Some people were just taking off their shoes and walking around. Well, that’s what we did too! Some people must have thought we were interesting, because they took pictures of us. Joni enjoyed the attention.
We did at least get to see the San Marco church.
And a bird!
We walked across the square and made it all the way over to the edge of the grand canal. After gawking at the gondolas a bit, we went back across the square and saw the flooded shops and restaurant. Nobody was sitting at the restaurants outdoor tables for some reason.
During our adventure we did find a little rise surrounded by flood that we claimed as our personal island.
And despite the flood, shops were still open for business!
Bikers were also no deterred by a little water!
At this point we made the decision to cross back one more time to the far side of the flood and put our shoes back on. Unlike most of the people there, we actually had a towel in the backpack from the beach trip to dry off our feet!
Apparently we were on the side of the island that gets cruise ships because as we were going to change into shoes, this huge ships just floated past. It was kinda eerie to just see this big thing silently float past the buildings.
We were getting pretty tired by this point, so we headed for the closest bus station. Although we had already done two trips, technically using all the trips we had paid for, since we didn’t check in for the first one, we figured the cards might have one charge left. Along the way, we found the only handicap accessible bridge in Venice.
Seriously, all the bridges have steps. Between that, and the crazy canals with boats as the only form of transportation, I can’t imagine going to Venice if you can’t handle walking and stepping. Even the taxis are boats!
Even the gondolas are boats!
Wait…
We also saw Venice’s leaning tower. Beyond the fact that it’s leaning, and it’s white, we have no other information.
We eventually got to the station, despite Venice’s best efforts to confuse us, and the tickets worked. We caught the next water bus back to the train station and felt very ashamed of our wickedness. On the way we got to see another of Venice’s islands. This one looked like a fort for trees.
When we checked in to the hostel, the lady at reception recommended a couple of food places next to the train station. We checked them out, but they didn’t look too interesting. We found a place between them that was more to our liking, so we sat down and had some supper. Joni had Spaghetti and I tried risotto. It was pretty decent.
By this time it was about 8:30. We had basically done everything we wanted to do in the city, but our over night train to Rome didn’t leave until 11:30! We spent the three hours going back to the hostel and getting our large backpack, then sitting in the train station watching a movie. The time went quickly, and before we knew it we were sitting in our train compartment awaiting our seven hour ride to Rome.
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