Venice

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Hi Everyone!
Independent travel is a fascinating business. Planning everything yourself and finding your own way around can be almost a full time job in itself. This is the opposite of joining a tour group and letting someone else do all the planning and following them around blindly like a puppet. You don't have to think about anything, you can just let someone hold your hand.
I don't approve of tour groups for alot of reasons. What you gain in easiness you sacrifice in understanding. If you can't find your place on a map or use it to get from point A to point B then you can never understand the way a particular place operates. Being is strange place is like having a hazy outline in your mind. Venice to me was a land of canals and gondolas and I always though of it during Carnivale with everyone running around in masks. You have to see how the hazy images fit together by navigating your way through a city.
I took a 10 day tour of France when I was 16 and my memories of France are historic sites I didn't know anything about and hotel rooms connected by boring bus rides where our obnoxious tour guide made us stand at the front of the bus and in front of 150 stangers and sing pop songs.
This trip is completely different.
I highly recommend everyone see Venice. It is a magic place, unlike any other on earth. Bruges and Amsterdam claim to be the 'Venice of the North' but while they are each great in their own way they are nothing like Venice. Venice is an entirely pedestrian island, which is great for someone who was tired of people trying to run me down on a bicycle. Although some of the streets of Venice are so narrow that one lady with a stroller will block traffic for 200 meters in each direction which is equally annoying. Walking in Venice is like navigating a labyrinth only instead of trying to find the center your trying not to fall in a canal. (but that only happened to me once...okay twice). And the streets themselves have crazy long names. Forget main street or even ... Venice has street names like 'Campo Santa Maria di Formosa' which is so long that it doesn't even fit on the map. In fact, most of them don't fit on the map.

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Photos

Masks!
Masks are everywhere in Venice. A popular souviner, but only a few shops design their own masks, most of them are imported.

under the bridge
This large bridge seperates Piazza Roma with the main part of the island.

Pedestrian bridge
These stairs on the bridge help make it possible to keep out the cars.

Canal
Canals run everywhere between buildings. The canals work to drain the water from the city back into the lagoon.

Museum art
This is from a special exhibit

San Maro
This church was built over the body of Saint Mark (the apostle) in the 9th century AD. His body was 'appropriated' from Egypt by two Venetians and Saint Mark was made the patron saint of the city.

gondolas
A new gondola cost 30,000 dollars. A used one cost 10,000 dollars.

Gondolier
Only men are allowed to be gondoliers.

steps into the canal
There aren't any guide rails or anything. Step right into a boat or a canal from any of the handy steps.

Well
These covered water wells used to supply the city with water. Now water is piped in from the Alps.

A tunnel into the canal
I was walking down this street trying to get some dust out of my eye and I almost kept walking right into the water.

Comments

[jennys mom]

venice
do people actually use the steps to walk down into the canals? it didn't look like anyone was swimming or anything in any canal pics. or are they just to get into the gondolas? do they say why only men can be gondoliers? do people really 'live and work ' in venice? or is it mainly just a tourist island...? I think you should take your parents there sometime...