Trip to Venice - Day 1 - Part 2

So to pick up where Kris left off on our Venice trip... after we got to our hotel and dropped off our luggage, we pretty well turned right around and headed back out to continue exploring the city.

So let's talk about finding your way around Venice.  The streets, as Kristin mentioned, are hardly ever named, and if they are, the names are not written anywhere, and are rarely even known by the locals.  Each house will have a number address, but the numbers are assigned by district (the 6 in Venice), so to say you're looking for #4458 whichever street, no one will have a clue where you are looking for.  If you tell them, it's near Sala Maria de la Reina, past the gelato stand, and take a right, you'll find where you're looking for.
Despite this, we did rely on the GPS on our phone rather a lot.  It was the best option available.  This may not be saying much.  At one point, I was standing still, and captured these 4 screenshots from my phone.  I'm standing still remember.

This is actually centred near'ish to where I was standing.

5 seconds later:  The power of the blue circle surrounds me

5 more seconds.  Oh oh, where did the blue go?

Another 5 seconds.  Definitely did not jump over that canal

And finally, about 15 seconds after the first screencap.... Ahh, ok, so I'm apparently all over here now.

So we learned to set a course and just kinda keep on walking.  The GPS would catch up and make sense eventually.  In any case it was a beautiful day to be getting lost.

Sala San Marco Selfie

Our first destination was the Orsoni Colour Library.  This is a glass mosaic factory.  They are world renowned for the quality of their glass, which they create on the island of Venice.  Thanks to Andrea, a classmate of mine from Milano, we scored a free tour of the factory.  It was quite remarkable to see all the different colours that they can make.  They have sold tiles to places all around the world including the Segrada Familia in Barcelona (which we'll take pictures of in December), and the main cathedral in Sao Paolo Brazil.  Here are some of our favourite mosaics.

And the colour room.  This is about 1/2 of the room, and that is just a fraction of all the colours they produce.

What we found most remarkable was that the process of cutting these large sheets (about the size of a piece of paper) down to a tiny piece of glass, is all done manually.

This woman scores the pieces, and breaks them into small sheets, then two other women punch each into the right size above.

This was a cool display the had on the way in.

Following our trip to Orsoni, we found ourselves most of the way across the island from Sala San Marco, so we wandered the streets a bit, looking for some food, and also waiting for our dinner reservation.. but more on that later.
This was when we found the Jewish ghetto, which Kris already mentioned.
Much of the afternoon we kinda got lost, wandering into stores, and taking photos along the canals.  We particularly enjoyed this one.

What else would you do in a town without roads.

We realized we didn't get many good photos of our pre-dinner or our dinner restaurants.  The pre-dinner was a hectic standing room only bar, where you pushed up to the counter, and they had cicchetti, which is small bite sized portions of sandwiches and other finger food.  As I mentioned it was hectic, so I just kinda pointed at three things and we went with it... Can you guess what the third one is?

I'm still trying to guess, but I have some ideas.  Is this what a French Kiss in Italy is all about?

As I mentioned, this was our pre-dinner restaurant.  Kris found a really good 'off-the-beaten-path' restaurant on one of the searches she did.  It was called Sala Marisa, and the most notable thing about it is, you don't get a menu... you make a reservation, walk in, and they start bringing you out whatever they decided to cook that night.  Since we were there on Friday, it was fish night.  We had a 5 piece appetizer, including pan fried squid, tuna, monkfish seviche, and mussels, with a polenta base.

We were fairly well fed by the end of this course.... next came a seafood lasagna, then we had a large plate of fried seafood (they started only bringing us one serving at this point), we were skipped on the salad course entirely, and finished off with a thick cream and biscuit dessert.  Needless to say we pretty well rolled out of the restaurant.  

Guesses for which of the two was Justin's vs. Kristin's?... Hello darkness my old friend.

This was the outside... sorry, I did mean we didn't get any good photos of the restaurant.

We walked our way back to the hotel after this to end our first day in Venice.  With the streets more emptied of the 'day' tourists (many leave at dusk to return across the Causeway to Mestre where their hotels are located), the walk back was quite enjoyable because we would turn a corner and open onto a church square, or outside a club or restaurant with live music playing.  It seemed there was a pleasant new surprise around every corner.  

More to come on Day 2 tomorrow.