Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Hot as Hades Tour: Venice

Well, if you are one of my Facebook friends you might remember this dilemma...Do we go to Florence for a day and then to Venice for a day or do we just go to Venice and not rush for 2 days? Well I got a ton of great feedback on both sides of the fence. In reality, I could already hear my children (and husband for that matter) saying, "Do we really have to go see another museum? Why are all these statues naked? This is totally inappropriate." If you are the parent of younger children, can't you hear your's saying the same? Well with this in mind I decided to skip the David in Florence and just have some relaxing, no rush time in Venice. Well, for my family, that was just what they needed. The kids were way more excited about riding in boats on canals than naked statues anyway. :-)


Don't you think?

We arrived into Venice around 9:00 pm. Our first thought was to get ourselves to the hotel...however that was going to work. We walked out of the train station and what do you know...a boat taxi stand. THIS WAS AWESOME!!!!!!


Excuse Chad's drunk eye...that tends to happen in our pictures. Hahaha. We hopped into our boat taxi and we cruised through the canals to our hotel. These were the only Venice by night pictures I got, so you'll have to just bare with me. They are not the best. I was just snapping whatever caught my eye.


Our first morning we decided to take advantage of one of the offers by our hotel, which was a free tour of one of the Murano glass factories over on the Island of Murano. Murano is famous for its glassmaking. A tour such as this was on our list of "try to do's" for Venice and we were thrilled that our hotel gave this as a complimentary tour. We arrived at the New Murano Gallery and got our own personal guide to show us through the factory.


They had just done their final production day the day before. Many European businesses take the month of August off as their summer vacation. Because of this, they were not making any pieces at the time, but they did have a great demonstration that the kids got to take part in. The glass maker (not sure the official name of these guys) demonstrated a vase, a horse and then he let the kids blow a glass bubble. The horse was crazy impressive.


Okay, so let me explain what took place above. The top picture, obviously, is the end product. The detail is hard to make out in the bottom pictures. He was doing this incredibly fast. I was fascinated. The first picture shows him turning the molten glass. He had just taken those big tweezers, in his hand, to make the mane of the horse. He just sort of plucked at the glass and...voila, a mane. Next he spun it around so that he could pull out the legs. Finally, from where the glass was connected to the metal stick, he pulled it off forming the tail and then placed the sculpture on the rock next to him and formed out the body. This, literally, took him less than a minute.

He also demonstrated the vase above and then the kids got to have a go.


You weren't allowed to take any pictures inside their showroom. I suppose this is for fear of people getting an idea and having the piece copied. I was able to snap a few on our way that showed some of their work. It really was incredibly beautiful.


After the tour and the walk through the showroom, we headed back to our hotel, to drop off our purchases (this will be revealed in my post on shopping) and to figure out our next move. We had another opportunity to enjoy the scenery as the boat brought us back to the hotel.


At this point we decided to take the advice of Rick Steves and attempt a Grand Canal Cruise, upon one of the vaporetto boats, these are just like a city bus, except on the water.


Rick Steves suggests that you get on one of these, just like the one above, with seats in the front and you just "cruise" the canal...well, that certainly was not as feasible as we had hoped. We hopped on and off a few, but the bottom line was, they were packed liked sardines and we never had one, at any of the stops we were at, that had the seating in the front. So we just rode them, like a bus or a metro, and set off to find the Hard Rock for lunch. I was able to get some good pictures, though they were only from the side of the boat I was smashed into. :-)


We found the Hard Rock and had a yummy lunch. Some of the things we love about going to The Hard Rock is that 1) the menu is pretty much the same everywhere, this means we know exactly what we are ordering and we know the kids will eat and 2) the wait staff is from all over the world and we meet people with super interesting stories no matter what country we are in. We love this. Our waitress spoke perfect English, so of course, this strikes up conversation. Well it turned out that she was from Mexico, but really close to the California border, so she learned English that way. We asked her how she ended up in Venice and her response, "Love". Well that was just perfect for this little town. She fell in love with an Italian and now they live there. So neat.


We had to wait a few minutes for a table and we just took in the beauty of the little square where Hard Rock was located.


After lunch we walked around Venice. It becomes clear, very quickly, though one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen, it would be a very difficult place to live your life. There really are two parts of Venice. There is the mainland Venice and the island part of Venice. If you look at a map of Venice you can see the island part is shaped like a fish. The island of Venice, where we stayed, does not have any cars. The only means of transportation are boats, which was awesome for us on vacation, but imagine living here on a daily basis and transporting things. We saw construction taking place, moving boats and even a UPS boat. I don't know about you, but this looks a bit daunting to me. Being a military family and moving every couple of years I can't even imagine the time and energy it takes to move your household goods into a place on this island...one boatload at a time (literally).


This city is basically hundreds of little islands connected by over 400 bridges and 2,000 alleys. It survives on tourism alone. All of these bridges have stairs to walk up one side and down the other. We saw construction men hauling their wheelbarrows up, down and over these bridges. We saw elderly women lugging their grocery wheeled carts up, down and over these bridges. We saw moms with strollers bumping up, down and across these bridges. I was thankful at that moment that our kids were beyond that stage. :-) Here is a look at a few of the bridges.


The bridge at the top of this photo is called, Rialto Bridge. It was constructed in 1588. Until the 1850's, this was the only bridge crossing the Grand Canal. It was the grandest bridge that we saw.

Today, Venice is home to 58,000 people in this old city, which has decreased by half from just 30 years ago. Including mainland Venice there are about 270,000 people in total. Many of them come to the island to work each day, but then clear out in the evening. The evenings were quieter with much less people. It was nice to stand atop the Rialto Bridge and look out over the Grand Canal. It is absolutely breathtaking.


I could sit all day and watch all the boats, people and gondolas. Now you can't come to Venice and not ride in a gondola, right? Well we didn't ride in one, but got lots of pictures. We were actually going to try and take one of the gondolas that just cross the canal, but we just didn't get the chance. Taking a gondola ride is not only expensive, but during the day, you bake in the sun for most of the ride and as we watched all the riders, it looked a bit miserable.


Our last full day in Venice we needed to cross off: St. Mark's Square, St. Mark's Basilica, Doge's Palace, the Bridge of Sighs and a peek at some Venetian masks. We took the free shuttle boat from our hotel to Piazza San Marco.


It was just a short walk to St. Mark's Square and Basilica. We didn't go inside the Basilica because, honestly, the kids and Chad could have cared less at this point.


This is the largest square in Venice. It is nearly the size of two football fields long. St. Mark's Basilica is at the far end of the square. It was built in the 11th century. The bell tower that you see in the first picture is called Campanile. It is possible to ride an elevator 325 feet to the top, but we didn't.

On an edge of the square there is the Clock Tower, which was built during the Renaissance in 1496 and it marks the entry to the main shopping area called the Mercerie.


Just next to St. Mark's Basilica is Doge's Palace. This palace was the seat of the Venetian government and home to its ruling duke, or doge. It was the most powerful half-acre in Europe for 400 years.


We now set off to find the Bridge of Sighs. This bridge connects the Palace with the prison. It is said that a condemned man would be led over this bridge on his way to the prison, to take one last look at the glory of Venice, and sigh.


We began wondering through the much less touristy alleys of Venice in search for our lunch location. A Rick Steves recommendation. Upon our wandering we stumbled upon the cutest Venetian mask shop. I had hoped we would come upon such a place and we were in luck. The kids and I were itching to go inside. These masks were truly amazing. The shop we found appeared to house all hand made masks and not manufactured ones, as the woman behind the counter was gluing on decorations as we were walking through. We didn't let the kids touch or try on these "fancy" masks, but they did get the chance to try one on in a souvenir shop, as these weren't as delicate.


We found our lunch spot and it was as authentic as we had hoped. Ellie loves pasta, but doesn't like a tomato based sauce, so when the waiter mentioned a spaghetti with clams, she lit up like nobody's business. We opted for a more traditional meat sauce spaghetti for our second dish. These pasta dishes are meant for two people and they weren't kidding.They were so delicious. Ellie was sad at the end that we wouldn't let her take home the clam shells. Sheesh!!!!


With one last sleep our time in Venice quickly came to a close. This blog, I am sure, does not do Venice justice. It was, by far, one of the most beautiful places we have ever been. We were not disappointed in our decision to skip Florence and spend some relaxing days in Venice instead. Though we were sad to go, the time had come, so we boarded our water taxi to the airport, which made our last experience in Venice one we certainly won't forget.


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