Venice is a city built with a maze of streets on a maze of canals. It is made up of 117 small islands. Without a city map it's easy to get lost and even with one it can be challenging to navigate around. Thankfully Z has a really good sense of direction and an amazing ability to read maps and figure out where he is, so we didn't have too much trouble.
Right outside the main train station, we bought 48-hour passes for the vaporetto, which allowed unlimited usage during this time period. The vaporetto is Venice's public waterbus service which gets people around the city. It was quite convenient and can also get quite packed so we usually ended up standing along with most other passengers.
We enjoyed several different areas of Venice during our stay. Wondering around the Ca' d'Oro we found a restaurant for dinner our first night there with a great outdoor patio. Afterwards we made our way over to Piazza San Marco. This square is the largest in Venice. There was an outdoor concert with the Philharmonic and Opera happening, so access was limited to the area by the Basilica. We stayed for awhile to listen to the concert, but I'm not a huge fan of opera so we didn't stay too long. Instead we walked away from the square towards the canal and found a restaurant with a live band consisting of violin, bass, piano and accordion and their music suited my taste much more.
With the city being built around the canals, it shouldn't be a surprise, yet it was still quite the sight to see water ambulance and water police boats. The city didn't strike me as unclean as some have described it. We had no trouble communicating in limited and broken Italian with a lot of English. In fact, in all the places we visited in Italy we got by mainly with English and found the people to be rather friendly and hospitable.
Venice does not have a shortage of restaurants or gelato shops. In fact we probably averaged at least one gelato a day and usually the serving consisted of two flavours, in some cases three, but no one was keeping track Z. My favourite flavour turned out to be hazelnut with tiramisu a close second.
We stayed at Hotel Al Ponte Mocenigo, which opened in 2005. It's a smaller hotel consisting of only 18 rooms. It was quite a neat place and we got upgraded to a bigger room which was a nice treat. The room was very ornate with silk feeling material on the walls. The hallway walls also had exposed brick and I couldn't quite figure out if it was built that way or not. Our room was actually located in a separate building from the main hotel and had its own separate entrance. To get there originally, we had to walk down this extremely narrow street. The hotel had a delightful breakfast and could be enjoyed on a small outdoor patio.
We got to witness some of the sinking problem walking along the Grand Canal in the afternoon. The water was spilling over onto the walkways. We also witnessed the same thing at the Basilico di San Marco when we visited it during the day. Where we stood the night before, now had several inches of water and we had to walk over a makeshift small bridge to enter. I could not figure out where the water was coming from because it's not situated right next to a canal. The area from which we exited the Basilico was also slightly emerged in water. The interior is very ornate with gold ceilings and beautiful paintings. We learned that it has been rebuilt three times. As a woman your shoulders must be covered and you can't wear shorts. This was strictly enforced and I had to pay $1 Euro for a paper shawl to cover my shoulders.
The area known as Rialto has a great open air market with tasty cheap fresh fruits and vegetables. There are also plenty of shops selling a wide variety of items. I ended up buying an Italian leather purse for what I thought was a good price, $18 Euro.
We made our way to Venice's Lido. Here we found a boulevard of shops, restaurants and gelato shops. At the end of the boulevard is a great sandy beach that stretches for 11 kilometres. Here we also got to test out the waters of the Adriatic Sea. The water was very nice and refreshing and while we didn't have our swim gear with us, walking along the shoreline was quite lovely as well.
Our hotel informed us that on the day we had to leave, there would be a general strike which meant that the vaporetto's would not be operating their regular service. This was not a huge deal because we had to make our way to the bus station, which was about a 15 minute walk from our hotel and it was not too difficult to find. The bus station is called Piazzle Roma and from there we had to take a People Mover (a short skytrain-like ride) to our bus which was taking us to our next destination, Austria.
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