1st Anniversary

Last weekend, we took a quick trip to Venice to celebrate our first anniversary. I can't believe it's been a year already! It seems like it was just yesterday that we were hanging out on the beach in Hawaii with all of our family and friends.

Venice was nice, although exhausting, and we thoroughly enjoyed wandering around all of the tiny streets and canals.

We stayed in a tiny B&B called Residenza Al Doge Beato which was very Venician. I had requested a canal view room, but it wasn't available the first night that we check in so we were given this room instead:


I've always wanted to stay in a room with a four post bed! Each room that we stayed in was also equipped with a bidet...interesting...

One of us gave it a whirl, one of us DID NOT. I thought it looked like a really good place to soak my aching feet after hours upon hours of walking, but Jason was pretty insistent that that wasn't a very good idea.

Every morning, the B&B staff brought us breakfast in our room. The cappuccino was amazing! Italians definitely know how to make coffee.


This is the room we were moved to for the second part of our stay:


No four post bed, but the view was really nice:

On our first day there, we mostly just wandered around enjoying a very sunny day.

Here we are after visiting the Rialto Bridge Market where they sold lots of fresh fish, meats, fruits, and vegitables. We were wishing our room had a kitchen so we could have taken advantage of all the great looking food!


A typical "street" in Venice, it was like navigating through a maze most of the time.


Another typical Venician site:


Don't get me wrong here, I definitely do not want to give up my clothes dryer or anything, but I thought it was neat to see all the laundry air drying. It gave the city a neat, quaint feeling.

A quick stop for lunch - this is what we ate for nearly every meal in Venice. It was really the only affordable food you could find outside of McDonalds (some evils just can't be escaped!).


We also visited the Jewish Ghetto, the section of the city that Venetian Jews were forced to live in beginning in 1516 the Venetian Republic issued a special law declaring their segregation. It was the first European ghetto. Much like the ghettos of the second World War, it was an area where Jews were forced to live and from which they could not leave from sunset to sunrise. The area was closed by gated shut and watched by guards. The ghetto existed for more than two and a half centuries, until Napoleon conquered Venice and finally opened and eliminated every gate in 1797). The term 'ghetto' was first used to refer to this Venetian Ghetto in Venice. The word actually comes from the word "getto" or "gheto", which means slag in the Venetian language, and was used in reference to a foundry where slag had been stored in the area to which the Jewish were confinement. The word and model was resurrected during the second World War.


You can tell from the map below that Venice is basically two larger land masses, each with many, many smaller canals, and separated by the larger Grand Canal.


Because there are only two bridges that transverse the Grand Canal, you can end up having to walk quite a bit out of your way to get where you want to go. One of the ways the Venice locals get around this is to use what are known as traghettos:


These stops are positioned at various points along the grand canal and are serviced by very basic gondolas. For about 1.50 euros (~$2), you can pack yourself on one of these boats (standing) with about 15 others for a quick shuttle across the canal. They seemed to be quite popular with the locals, but we never got the chance to take advantage of one because we couldn't figure out their very irregular time schedules. By the way, want to know what else $2 will get you in Venice? The "luxury" of using a public toilet. These were very sparse; I think we only saw two or three the entire time we were there, but they are run by a very elaborate system of coin acceptors, turnstiles, and attendants who made sure no one peed for free!

On our second day in Venice, we planned to visit Piazza San Marco, the tourist destination of the city. I have heard a number of horror stories about how packed the square gets, so I talked Jason into getting up early to check it out. We left our B&B a little before 7AM, so we decided to take the "bus" since we weren't quite awake enough to navigate the streets. Here's a picture of Venice's bus system, vaporetto:


Crazy, huh? The "buses" are basically ferry boats that pull up to floating docks to load and unload passengers. It wasn't the quickest form of transportation (you could usually get where you wanted to faster by walking), but it was neat to experience. Most of the day these boats were packed full of people, but first thing in the morning we nearly had the boat to ourselves and got to experience a very quiet, peaceful trip down the Grand Canal:


Our destination, Piazza San Marco, from the canal. On the right is the Doge's Palace and lined up along the waterfront are hundreds of gondolas, ready to provide a ride to eager tourists for the low, low price of about $80 per person...we passed.


Here we are in the piazza, nearly the only ones there!

On the left of this picture and in the picture below it is the Doge's Palace again. We toured it later in the day and learned a bit about the history of Venice. It was pretty much the only "touristy" thing we did while we were there and we really enjoyed it.


Also in the Piazza San Marco is St. Mark's Cathedral, a pretty impressive building to say the least.



We had to pass back through the piazza later in the day when our tour of the palace let out. Boy were we glad to have visited early!...this is the scene we found:

We pretty much had to throw elbows just to make our way through!

After our tour of the palace, we made our way out to a small island directly across the water from the Piazza San Marco. The island of San Giorgio Maggiore is known for its church and accompanying campanile (bell tour) with amazing views of Venice and the surrounding lagoon islands.


I also snapped this picture from the island; it illustrates well the great disappointment of our trip:


Let me explain. When we first visited Cambridge three or so years ago, we took a punting tour where we first saw and heard the history behind this bridge, called The Bridge of Sighs:


I immediately loved it because of its neat architecture and the interesting story behind it. What we learned was that one of the benefactors of St John's College (where it is located) had it commissioned after a visit to Venice where he saw and fell in love with the original Bridge of Signs. The Cambridge bridge is said to have been given the same name as the bridge in Venice because of the "sighs" students emit as the pass through the bridge after learning of their exam scores. The original bridge in Venice received its name because it was the bridge that state prisoners crossed from the court house to the prison after receiving their sentences. So, we were excited to see the original bridge while we were in Venice. Unfortunately, what we found when we went to visit the bridge is what you see in the disappointing picture above. Not only was the bridge barely visible amid a bunch of scaffolding set up for renovation work, but the obnoxious advertisements covering the scaffolding detracted from it even further. If you look really close, you can just see the bridge, set back a bit, passing between the Doge's palace and the old state prison. Interestingly, the bridge in Cambridge bears little, if any, resemblance to the original Venetian bridge.

After another day of touring around, our original plan had been to go our for a nice, romantic dinner. But, we had done so much walking in our first two days on vacation, that by 6PM we were completely and totally exhausted. We opted for plan B, a "romantic" dinner in our room. We stopped at some local stores and picked up some bread, Italian meats, Prosecco (and paper cups to drink out of!), potato chips (random addition, I know), and homemade tiramisu - yum!

It was actually a really fun evening with our nice canal view!

After a good night's rest (I think we were asleep by 9PM!), we set out for our last day of exploring Venice. We spent the day on a nearby island called Murano, which has been famous for its blown glass for centuries. We visited a glass factory:


We also visited lots and lots of glass shops and galleries with the coolest (and most expensive) glass art work I've ever seen. I loved looking at all the neat vases, plates, etc, etc, but Jason claimed that it "all looked the same." Wish you could have been there Mom, you would have loved it!