Excellent Adventure 2011 - Day 1 - I ♥ VENEZIA!

Today was a very pleasant day in Venice today. We had booked a walking tour called “Treasures of Venice”. We walked for two hours, mostly through sections of Venice that tourists don’t usually visit. It was great just to wander narrow streets. Our tour guide, Barbara, a Venice native, was also great – very lively and knowledgeable with very clear English.

Venice trivia:

• 1. Everywhere else in Italy, a plaza or square is called a “piazza”. In Venice, there’s only one piazza – Piazza San Marco. Everything else is called a “campo”. There are over 400 campos in Venice.
• 2. Due to the fact that Venice is sinking, some of the bell towers are leaning. Barbara showed us the first one, and we noticed at least two others as the ship was leaving port.
• 3. Before the underground water system was installed to pipe in water from the mainland, water was collected in cisterns. There used to be a cistern in every campo. Not any more.

When we were in Venice in 1999, there were a zillion cats all over the city – to keep the rat population down. We did not see a single cat today. Several dogs, no cats.

After the tour, we stayed behind in Piazza San Marco to have lunch. The piazza is always crowded, but today half the space was taken up with preparations for a Sting concert.

We randomly wandered the streets, sorta shopping for places that displayed Kiddush cups. We had bought 2 in 1999; we did not see any today that we liked. We did see several spectacular hand-blown chandeliers – the most expensive was a mere $10K. I wasn’t even sure it would fit in the dining room anyway.

We decided to ride in a gondola. The gondolas leaving from the Rialto Bridge neighborhood were less expensive than the gondolas by San Marco. We made a deal with a gondolier; apparently, another guy who was not on the scene blocked his gondola – we had to climb through the other guy’s gondola to get to the one we hired. This did not work well – I rather ungracefully got stuck trying to step from one gondola to the other. I will have a lovely bruise to show for that. The gondola ride itself only lasted 20 minutes, but we did have a great view of the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal.

About 2:30 it was time to head back to the ship. We took a public water bus back to the dock and made note of where it let us off, so we could to the reverse and take it to Piazza San Marco the day we leave the ship to spend our last day of vacation in Venice.

We had our “safety drill” a few minutes after returning to the ship. After walking all day and climbing up and down steps on every bridge, it was not attractive to have to walk down three flights of stairs to our “mobilization station”. Afterwards, we ended up climbing back up the three flights of stairs, because all the elevators were clogged.

Before we went to dinner, we went out on the veranda to watch Venice go by as the ship left port. It was an amazing view - we noticed at least two more towers that were leaning, and we could see the crowd jammed into Piazza San Marco.

We had dinner with a woman named Elisa, who was traveling by herself. She didn’t say why she was single, just that she’d been traveling alone for the last eight years.

The big entertainment of the evening was 4 guys who called themselves “Cantare” (Italian for “sing”). Definitely better than last year’s “harmonica guy”. After the show, we visited the piano bar; the piano guy (Jimmy) held a Beatles “Name That Tune” that we did not do nearly as well as we thought. But we had a great time. Tomorrow is “Elvis Name That Tune”. Yeah, nevermind.

Tomorrow: Split, Croatia.