Venice…

Sorry for the sparcity of updates; we've been just doing day to day stuff, and that's not a lot of fun to read (or write about). We did take a trip over settimana bianca though. What's that? Perhaps I should back up a bit...

In addition to bunches of other strange customs over here, a lot of Italians take a week off in February to go skiing. The schools evidently got tired of seeing so many empty desks for that week in February, so they declared it an official school vacation. I wasn't able to find any additional information on this holiday online (that wasn't in Italian), so you'll either just have to take my word for it, or do your own research on the history of it. Anyway, for settimana bianca this year, we loaded up the kids and drove to Venice.

Everyone's heard of Venice so I won't bore you with a long history or geography lesson - I'll just tell you about our trip. We put Minnie at a local stable and drove about 6 hours up the boot of Italy, all the way from the kneecap to the back of the thigh. We stayed in a local hotel in Mestra, and it was a standard Italian room; one big room with 3 beds, and a bathroom. I guess we lucked out, some of the "suites" on our floor had to share a bathroom. The location was fine, very convenient to a bus to Venice. The breakfast buffet was standard Italian fare as well; nothing spectacular, but once they threw some croissants onto a serving plate and put out a few containers of cereal, they could say that they had a "breakfast buffet". Italy isn't known for its breakfast, and the buffet met our expectations.

We got to our hotel the first night and after unpacking some of our stuff, we went out searching for food. We had pizza at a restaurant in a nearby town.

The next morning, we started on Venice. The bus to Venice took about 20-25 minutes, and was €10.40 round trip (about $13.75) for all four of us. The bus dropped us off at the parking lot at the main bus terminal, and it's incredibly confusing with the possibility of going in several different directions. The main islands of Venice are shaped (generally) like a jumping fish, with the main bus terminal right on top of the head. Saint Mark's Basilica is midway down the belly of the fish, with the Grand Canal running in a generally backwards S shape, from the bus terminal to Saint Mark's. We took off walking, and immediately got lost. I think this is probably the main tourist activity in Venice, and we spent over half of our time that way. The whole city is full of little alleys, confusing bridges (over 400 of them), and streets that dead end into canals.

We wandered our way around to Saint Mark's, and caught a vaporetta (public bus) to the island of Murano. Public transportation once you're in Venice itself is via boat, and if you're planning on visiting Venice, you need to do a LOT of research on how to get around. A one hour bus ticket (enough to get you from one end of the Grand Canal to the other) costs €6.50 (about $8.50), and a 12 hour ticket costs €16.00 (about $21.15)..... back to our narrative though. We saw a glass blowing demonstration in Murano and bought the requisite souvenirs. We bought a bunch of souvenirs while we were on Venice as well, spending WAY too much money... After making our way back over to the main island(s) and meandering to the bus station, we rode the (wheeled) bus back to our hotel and searched for a store to buy bread and cold cuts for dinner to try to save a little bit of money.

The third day, we decided to visit Nove, a "nearby" town that's known for its ceramics; We got lost looking for a specific factory, but once we found it, we managed to spend WAY too much money, on stuff that we didn't know that we couldn't live without.

I have to pause my story at this point to relate another story: We were having some difficulty finding some of the retailers that we were looking for... I was under the impression that the town that we were planning to visit was right off of a main road of some type; that wasn't the case. It was pretty confusing to get there, and I'll admit that my frustration level was pretty high. Rebecca was punching random addresses (as near as I can tell) into the GPS, and the addresses that she was punching in weren't leading us to where she was expecting them to, and (she swears that she didn't have anything to do with this) somehow the voice for our GPS got changed from the non-offensive British accent to Afrikaans. She’s not allowed to use the GPS any more. Once we were in the right area of town, we ended up wandering around until we found the specific retailer that she was looking for.

Anyway, we spent a couple of hours browsing around the store, there were racks and racks of pretty cool pottery; we ended up with 8 (or so) big serving bowls.

We stopped at the Army base at Vicenza (on the way back to our hotel) for lunch... the bases always have American food (that's relatively cheap) - the base up there has a Burger King with a drive-thru and (to the kids enjoyment) a playscape (the first one we've seen in Italy)!

We went back to Venice that afternoon, took a bus down the Grand Canal to Saint Mark's and wandered around until it started getting dark, then made our way back to the bus terminal. We went back to the hotel and went to a pizzeria down the street from our hotel for dinner.

We checked out from the hotel the next morning and drove back to Vicenza for a little shopping before we drove back. Burger King again before we left the base, then drove the 6 hours back home.

Next up, Spring Break! Maybe I can post a better blog entry next time.