Venice

It's been a while without an update. Kevin says he was hoping we'd finish this trip by Christmas. I'll blame part of the delay on the fact that my mom was here visiting last weekend and I wasn't going to sit here and write blog posts while she was here. Anyway, the next stop on our trip was Venice. Now, the first thing to do when you're hearing about Venice is to check out this picture. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Crazy, huh? There is basically no order at all to the way the buildings are arranged. Some of the streets you see there are actual streets and some are canals. You can see the rail line we took to get there starting at the top left of that satellite picture. Hm, looks like google has some halfway decent imagery of Venice too.

Anyway, Venice is different. I think it first hits you when you step out of the train station and see the view above. On a related note, I recently discovered that Photoshop has a built in photomerge function. Pretty cool.

We walked across the bridge you see on the left there and over to the dock for one of the water busses they have that run down the main canal. That allowed us to get a good look at a lot of the city without paying for an expensive tour. We saw a number of churches, buildings with doors that led right into the water, and what is probably one of the world's largest balloon animals.


Of course, I can't forget to mention that we also went under the most famous bridge in Venice, the Ponte di Rialto. You can see a couple of gondolas in the shot below too.


And because it seems like otherwise this post about Venice couldn't be complete, let's throw in some pictures of guys in striped shirts driving gondolas. This is the part where my mom would bring up a certain insurance commercial.

Hey, how'd that guy in the white shirt get in there? Someone call security!

Anyway, after we got off our "bus" we headed in to the city to look around a bit on more solid ground. We walked by a number of different shops selling Venetian glass. I thought that stuff was cool, so I will now show you a bunch of examples. They make all kinds of stuff out of glass.


Eventually we got pretty hungry and we grabbed some dinner at a little place in an alley. Kevin and I both got a pasta dish with seafood in it. That dinner was fantastic, and even though it cost plenty of money it was still cheaper than what we spent on that crappy meal in Florence. I was too busy enjoying this one to take pictures of it.

After dinner we walked back to near the place where we caught the "bus" and grabbed a real bus (the kind with wheels) to take us to our hostel campsite place.