Venice! (Part 1 of many)

Sorry for the late post! We went to Venice last weekend for our fifth anniversary, and we had a great time. It's a ridiculously beautiful and photogenic city - much of the delay has been sorting through the 1428 pictures on the main camera, plus those from our phones as well! I've been dithering over whether to post chronologically, or thematically, and I think I just need to start somewhere!

This was our first flight out of East Midlands airport - we were parked literally 20 minutes after leaving our apartment, which is convenient since we had to get up at 3:30 in the morning! It was also our first flight with Ryanair, one of Europe's budget airlines. So far so good, as we were super careful on a lot of their strict rules (much smaller carryon luggage allowance, have to check in and print ticket ahead of time, etc) which can result in big penalties, wiping out any savings in airfare. I do think they needed more than one ticket counter open for the several flights leaving that morning, but otherwise everything went smoothly. EMA is about half the size of Ottawa Airport, and not quite as modern - similar to Windsor airport I guess.

We had the back row of the airplane (no one in the middle seat, yay!) and got to enjoy some neat vistas on the way there:

After landing in Treviso airport, we took a bus across the bridge connecting Venice to the mainland, to the edge of the traffic zone - Venice has no cars or motorized vehicles other than boats (even bikes are banned, although they'd be completely useless - more on that later!). The island (actually hundreds of small manmade islands, linked by something like 800 bridges) is very easily walkable - we crossed it several times. It was pretty interesting to navigate, as most signs for the 'streets' are up on the walls of buildings, and some are graffiti'd by residents (as one tour guide said, when you have 58,000 residents and Venice sees 16 million tourists in one year, sometimes they get a bit miffed!) to mislead you.

Yellow signs point you towards major landmarks, and usually have an arrow with fletchings. This was one of the 'better' attempts to confuse people. Bear in mind these signs are usually about 10-15 feet off the ground.

This one was tricky on a quick glance

These were not quite so well done

 Now when I say streets, I really mean alleys. They are narrow, and the walls are not always parallel. Remember this city was built hundreds of years ago and they really can't renovate - both because the entire city is a protected UNESCO heritage site, and because they have unique restrictions (the city is built on sunken petrified tree trunks which can't hold additional weight, and you can't get heavy machinery into many areas). GPS is almost completely useless because there are really no open areas - you are almost always surrounded by walls. Justin has a neat visual of how this made his cell go crazy, but I'll leave that to him.

Typical side street

Larger, main street

Welcome to the hotel (not ours), please disembark!

Hope you like strangers seeing your laundry!

 

 

 

Hope your pegs hold well!

One island on the left, another on the right

This is one of the biggest open areas, in the Jewish ghetto (their words, not mine!)

Side note from the Jewish ghetto - these are made from Murano glass (one of the major exports and industries of Venice) - does anyone else find it deeply hilarious that the 'kosher candy' glass costs more than the regular candy, and except for a gold letter in Hebrew on them, are made exactly the same way? Can any of our Jewish friends weigh in on this?

We had fabulous weather like this all weekend - we were really lucky!

After making our way across the island, we found our hotel (the Hotel Doni, near Saint Mark's Square or San Marco, the main tourist attraction) and checked in. No elevators here! We were on the 4th floor, only one floor above us - the logs supporting the city don't usually allow anything taller than 5 stories.

Original circular pieces of Murano glass in the windows, questionable decorating taste

Ultramodern!

We dropped off our bags and headed out to explore (and eat until we were beyond full) - Justin has that entry coming up next!