Venezia!

We ventured down to Venice (Venezia in Italiano) today for the first time.  It was my and Abbie’s first time in Venice, and Mark’s 2nd.  It’s a beautiful city and fascinating to see.  We had a really good time walking all over the place.  We drove to the Sacile train station, which will be less than 10 mins from our house, and figured out how to buy our tickets from the guy in Italian.  It’s a lot of pointing and hand gestures with a mixture of English and Italian, but we got our point across and got 2 round trip tickets.  We were waiting on the platform for the train to get there when some lady came up and told us that if we were going to Venice that we were on the wrong platform.  How she knew we spoke English or that we were going to Venice is beyond me, but it’s a good thing she said something or we would have watched our train leave without us.

It was about an hour and 20 min train ride to Venice.  Abbie was getting tired so she was pretty pissy and Mark and I were really starting to wonder how much we were going to be able to travel while we live here with her.  She was quite the handful on the way there, but once we got to Venice, she was great!  Thank God!

 

We stopped for lunch shortly after we got there and shared a panini and a coke.  The one thing that I don’t like about Italy, in general, is that all the restaurants serve the same type of food, for the most part, ESPECIALLY in touristy areas.  It’s all paninis/wraps, pizzas and pastas and they’re all basically the same types/combinations of flavors.  The food is good, but I guess I like more variety.  Here’s our 3Euro can of Coke.  No joke!

So obviously Venice is full of canals.  They’re just beautiful.  There are guys trying to sell gondola rides EVERYWHERE, but in the Rick Steve’s book we borrowed from friends, it said they’re VERY expensive, so we didn’t even bother to ask prices.  We had more fun walking anyway.

 

There are these types of stores with produce and noodles out like these all over Italy.    We ran across a market that they were having.  They were cleaning most of it up as we got there, but there were still quite a few whole fish around, and they were cutting chucks off of really big ones.  I think these fish are REALLY fresh. Here’s the produce part of the market.  These never cease to amaze me.  They’re beautiful to look at and we got 2 bananas and an apple for 1Euro. I had to take a picture of the weina.  We saw 3-4 of them, including a wire-haired! This is the grand canal.  All the other little canals actually have street names, but this is the main one.

Of course we had to try out the gelato (for the first time since we’ve been here).  It was WONDERFUL! San Marco’s.

 

 

     There are these steps all over Venice.  This is how you get on and off all the boats/ gondolas.  A Venice ambulance!    

Venice was a lot of fun, and I’d love to go back and look at things a little more ‘in-depth’.  This time around it was kind of a quick run-thru where we got the feel of the place.  There are hundreds of shops to look in, and lots of people selling original artwork, so we’d love to go back and buy some of that.  I’m sure we’ll have lots of opportunities to explore Venice more when friends and family come to visit.  If you come to visit us, you really can’t pass up the opportunity to see Venice if you haven’t seen it before.  However, we’ve been told by quite a few people to not spend the night there, so I don’t think we’ll ever do that.  It’s kind of pointless anyway, since we live so close to it.  Why pay outrageous prices for a hotel there, when you can pay 8.80Euro to get home AND we won’t have to board the weinas somewhere.  But we’ll definitely go check it out.  (Mom and dad, I know you said we didn’t have to go while you’re here, but you’d love it, so we should go.)

Mark and I decided that Abbie just gets bored on planes, trains and in cars.  Once we’re out and about, she’s happy as a little clam.  She likes to be worn on our backs, better than our fronts, in the Ergo and she’ll just ride along back there and chatter and point.  She was great the entire time we were in Venice and most of the ride home too.  That Ergo was one of the best $100 we’ve ever spent.

Luckily I found a 2gb SD card for the camera at the BX for $9.95!  Score!  The pictures in this blog aren’t even a fourth of the amount that I took today.  I’ll try to post more on Facebook once we get the big computer hooked up.