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San Marco's
In all it's underwater glory.So one thing I forgot to add about France: We saw a KFC in Nice. That's not really a surprise given the number of Burger Kings, McDonalds, etc. in France, but the surprise for us was that it was called "KFC" not "PFK" like it is Quebec. Strange.
And I just remembered a really funny story from Paris that I forgot to blog about earlier. Amy had the hiccups. She'd tried pretty much everything to get rid of them, but it wasn't working. Neil suggested drinking water upside down. Now, that probably sounds weird if you've never heard of it before, but I've tried it at it does work, so I backed him up on the suggestion which eased Amy's skepticism.
But here's where it varies from my experience with drinking water upside down: I poured the water into my own mouth. I think this is a good strategy since you can control the flow and volume in a way that you feel is natural. However, Neil thought that he would help Amy by pouring the water for her. Well, needless to say, a few seconds later Amy was violently coughing up water.
So basically what happened is
Idle Gondolas
Nobody wants to tour the canals in the rain, apparently Neil waterboarded Amy. He claimed it was just "simulated drowning". It must be love.
Her hiccups were gone though...
On to Venice! We got to run for a train for the first time, so that right of passage is now complete. Our train to Milan was late, so we had exactly three minutes to figure out where our train to Venice was, and get on it. But we made it, and with at least thirty seconds to spare...
Venice is kind of like a giant floating/sinking maze. Maps are helpful and useless at the same time. Apparently locals even get lost. Mostly everyone just sets off in the general direction of where they want to go and eventually finds it.
We didn't have that confidence. But at 2.50euro for a map, we decided our guidebook maps were going to be enough.... Except that most "streets" in Venice don't have names, so it was pretty hard to locate our hotel on our map. Luckily, it seems as if the tourist office is used to that, so they were more than happy to mark it on my map. And then we set off into the labyrinth.
We
Decision Time
We could:
a) take off our shoes and socks and wade through, as some did.
b) try to find another drier way into the square.
We chose b), and did not regret it... circled the block it was on about three times, because we really couldn't believe that it was the super narrow alleyway that it was in. It was so narrow that I was actually able to Spiderman my way up in between the buildings. Two people heading in opposite directions would have a lot of trouble passing. Pretty cool. We checked into our hilariously Italian hotel. Everything in the room is made of the same fabric, and there's a huge glass chandelier in the middle. The walls match the headboard, quillts, headboard, curtains, and couch. We were quite amused by it.
First stop: dinner. I had the veal, and it was tasty and tender, like a baby cow should be.
Second stop: Gelato. Delicious Gelato! I got the Fragola flavour because I (correctly) guessed that it was strawberry, and it kind of sounds like "Fraggle". But Jim Henson probably wouldn't have made a Gelato flavour this tasty. I plan to eat a lot of Gelato in Italy...
Day 2: Pouring rain. Surprised? Of course not. We still decided to do some light wandering around, but we waited until the afternoon when the rain slowed down. We went to S.
Marco's square, which was cool.... and underwater. It was a foot deep in some places. It seems that drainage engineering has not been around forever....
A lot of people were just taking off their shoes, rolling up their pants, and trucking on in. We decided to see if we could find another drier way in. And we were eventually successful. It's a cool square, and it's full of pigeons. If you want to be mobbed by pigeons, it's the place to go.
Amy and Neil wanted to take the water taxi back to the hotel, and I wanted to walk. So we decided to Amazing Race it back to our hotel. it took me 22 minutes, including a stop for some lunch. Neil and Amy showed up about 15 minutes later after they'd given up on the line for the water taxi and had also walked....
Dinner saw us going to a pizza takeout place and grabbing a two foot diameter pizza for 10 euros. Not bad. We also got huge novelty sized 1 litre beers. And some wine. It was a good night. Especially since we have a TV in our room. There were roughly two
channels of interest to us: CNN international which is in English, and MTV Europe, which plays the same five songs over and over again. We kept seeing what we decided was a fatter, older, greasier version of Bruce Springsteen..... Vasco Rossi is his name, but don't bother looking him up. He's pretty terrible.
CNN was more enlightening, especially since we've pretty much been cut off from world news for the last three weeks. An Earthquake in China, a typhoon in Myanmar... it seems as though we missed quite a bit of big news.
Day 3: Sunny weather! We checked out a drier St. Marco's square and basilica, and then Neil and Amy went off to cruise the canals on a water taxi, which they said was really cool. I elected to wander the town. And wander I did. My plan was to walk as far east as I could, and turn back and come home the same way. But, I definitely got a little disoriented, and wandered in a completely different direction on the way back. So in my three hours of walking, I didn't set foot in the same place twice. I enjoyed exploring the city, and
Pigeon Boy
He just likes the attention... was never technically "lost" because I really had nowhere in particular to be. That's the way to do it. When I finally decided to figure out where I was using my map, I found that I was nowhere near where I thought I was, but I was able to navigate back to the hotel.
The big UEFA European championship was on that night, and Manchester United was taking on Chelsea. This is the first time two English teams have ever faced each other in the final. For how little I follow football/soccer, I had previously decided that Man U was my favorite team. Neil decided to cheer for Chelsea, just to be a jerk. It was a very exciting game that went to penalty kicks, but Man U pulled it off.
Venice is a pretty cool place, but our two full days there were definitely enough to see as much of it as we would ever want to. There really isn't a whole lot to see or do there, but it was totally worth seeing once.
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