Venice: Day 1

11:32 PM August 6, 2011

Venice is beautiful. You get out of the train station and you are facing the Grand Canal. And no, it didn't smell. Rumor has it that Venice smells bad in the summer.

You can easily get lost with all the narrow streets and bridges crossing the canal and the streets with no names. We got lost looking for our hostel--the directions the hostel people gave us was confusing.

As I've said before, we were tired, so it was awesome getting to our room and lying down for a bit. AND there was tv. We watched the Italian version of Maury show--hilarious!

We had lunch next to a small canal by our hostel. I had a typical Venetian dish--spaghetti with cuttlefish cooked in its ink. Ok, I was very afraid of this dish but comes highly recommended by Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. I mean, the sauce is black and made with ink! However, it was very, very delicious. It did not taste inky at all. I don't know how to describe the flavor, but it was savory. And the cuttlefish was fresh! Not chewy at all! Yum.

Afterwards, we made it to Piazza San Marco taking the water bus. The water bus is a pretty cool way of seeing the city from the water. We went to Palazzo Ducale, or Doge's Palace. It's where the ruling families of Venice would live and it was the government center of Venice during it's hay day. The cool part was we got to cross the Bridge of Sighs from the court chambers to the prison! Very extensive prison complex. I was just sad that the bridge of sighs and it's surrounding facades were covered because they are going through restoration. Restoration is good, but I just wanted to see it. I got a small book about Casanova and a small Venetian cook book. The Venice book I wanted was way too heavy to bring back home.

We were going to go inside Basilica San Marco but it closes at 5. We went around the shops looking at Murano glass and Venetian masks and the original, hand crafted ones are beautiful. I'm not leaving until I buy some. Had dinner in some small piazza. I had the grilled giltfish. Again, so fresh! It tasted like tilapia, but it didn't look like tilapia.

After dinner, Chelsea and I went back to Piazza San Marco to feed the birds (and yes, the Mary Poppins song was playing in my head as I did so). It was very frightening because there are sooo many pigeons! One landed on my arm and one landed on my head. It was very scary! They didn't poop on me, so that's good.

We took the water bus back to our hostel. Venice at night is just unreal. Very romantic :3
Got caught is a storm walking back to our hostel. It was very strange because it just came from no where! It felt nice since it had been hot all day, but still. No one wants to look like a wet rat.

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