Venice, Day 1.5

Justin was working on his post after I went to sleep last night, and there were a few more pictures from my camera that I wanted to share with you! Here are some pictures from Orsoni - their very simple nameplate (literally the only thing on the street that let us know we were in the right place! This company has multi-million worldwide contracts!):

Their colour matching guide - just like knitting, if you see a colour you like you'd better buy a lot of it, because the next set won't match exactly.

 These are the barrels they create the glass in - melting different metal powders/ores into them and firing in the furnace. After the barrels are finished, people use them for garden planters. I wish one would have fit in my carryon to bring home!

Another piece in the showroom that I really liked:

We also had some food (late lunch) at a canal-side restaurant, much like this one. We were a little shocked that that water cost as much as the half litre of wine, but I guess it makes sense when you live on an island surrounded by brackish water - everything has to be imported!

We also got to see low tide - there's a pretty big variation, when you consider how flat and low-lying this city is!

One of the interesting things about such a crowded city based on ancient plumbing is public washrooms - how to keep them up? Venice has 6 or 7 public washrooms TOTAL (for all those visitors!) and charges 1.50 Euro every time you go in (there is either an attendant or a coin-operated lock). So you make sure you use the bathroom at your hotel, restaurants, at large enough shops - we actually only had to use one pay toilet once while we were there, for 3.5 days. But you can bet we didn't use this one!

WTF??

Lastly, here are some food porn shots from Della Marisa, the dinner that Justin described. I may be known for how much food I can put away - this restaurant totally defeated me. I had to leave delicious food on the plate because I was so full. And it was 30 Euro per person, including unlimited wine (and water) - in an overpriced tourist city, that is just a ridiculous deal. Highly recommended if you're ever going to Venice.

After dinner, we walked (waddled) back across the island to our retro hotel, to get up nice and early the next day! (Just kidding, we totally slept in)

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.

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!