City of Love {Venice}

It has been a wonderful week having my parents here. I miss all the others at home, but again I repeat myself when I say it has been a gift! We headed to Venice for the weekend and after a series of events finally arrived! I could go into all the details of the missed trains and time that kept ticking by, but in the end it didn’t matter. We were together. In Italy.
We arrived in Venice to be able to check into our hotel. Again it took us a little while to find it. As an added bonus we got to see the back alleys and forlorn park of Venice. The woman behind the desk was so adorable when we arrived. As we described later, it was if someone’s grandma was welcoming us into her home. After settling in we headed to figure out this Venice transportation.

We ended up on a Vaperetto (a water bus) traveling down the canal towards the open water and the island of Murono. Murono is home to very famous glass and glass blowing demonstrations. We were late enough that the demonstrations were closing or already closed. It was still fun to see almost every shop be filled with glass objects. They were all such different styles even though they were the same material. We walked through a few of the galleries as well.
We stopped at a small café that was bursting with people and served pretty much everything a café in Italy might consider serving! We grabbed a bite to eat and then wandered the back alleys of the island. In one of the alleys we found a little fresh market where I ordered cheese for our dinner. The man behind the counter had a huge smile on his face when we said good bye. He was obviously amused by my limited Italian! I just got this red coat and it made me smile the entire day. {and it was thonly coat I brought to Venice...so you will see it a lot!}A vaperetto took us back to the main piece of Venice {I can’t say mainland because it isn’t…}. We walked through more alleyways with little pieces of light catching on the otherwise dark waters. Finally we made it to St. Mark’s square. There we “illegally” had our picnic dinner Stothers’ travel style; bread, salami, cheese, and limited utensils.
One of the things that I really wanted to do {or so I thought…} was to have coffee at one of the café’s in St. Mark’s square. I wanted to watch people and stare at the basilica in the moonlight. I was creating a fairytale dream for the land of fairytales. Unfortunately one wakes up from dreams and that is what happened. It was cold. Fall has come and it is similar to a Californian winter. Because it was cold people were not sitting out watching and taking it all in. Coffee is really expensive in the square even at the “cheap” places. Don’t let them fool you, it’s not cheap. The place we thought about going, well my two requirements would not be getting knocked off the list.
Needless to say, skipped the coffee and we went down the Gran Canal. It would have been nice to warm up, but it was so much more worth itto sit on the vaporetto! We sat in the back where it was cool, but quiet and there wasn’t lights shining in your face. There were two small boys riding and it was so fun to hear their banter and laughs in Italian.

Do you think we were in Italy?!?

After a little more wandering we settled in for much needed rest. And that was my first 10 hours in the famous Venice.