The City of Water, Venezia!

After our 3 hour train ride from Milan we finally made it to our final destination for the day. As we walked out of the train station we all just stood there in ah. This is one of our first looks at the city A city on the water? Life here is so different everyone has a boat, the city buses are city boats, the garbage truck is a garbage boat, everything that usually has 4 wheels (or more) is on a boat. It was hard to imagine living here. We even saw the UPS man wheeling packages from his UPS boat up and down stairs and over bridges. Not to mention he had to yell to get everyone out of the way through a street that was barely big enough to wheel his cart (which only had about 15 small boxes on it). (Alan you should be grateful you don't live here.) Here is a picture of the farmers daily harvest. (on the boat of course)


We got on the crowded city boat to get to our hotel. These boats are about 80 feet long and you should see the way these bus boat drivers drive. They have to get right up to the entrance of the dock, let people off and then get people back on, go through a maze of other traffic and they make it look so easy.



We checked into our hotel and did not want to go to sleep as this is the best way to get over jet lag. Here are some pictures of our hotel. It was on a nice quiet street.




So we got ourselves cleaned up and back to the lobby. We asked our hotelier where a good place to eat dinner was. He gave us a few suggestions and off we went. As we went to each location much to our surprise everyone was closed. As we were not far from the hotel we went back to see what the problem was. Well our problem was that all of the good restaurants don't open until about 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. Well as we Americans soon found out, the Italian culture is much different then ours. So unable to eat until 7:00 we decided to walk the canals. On our walk we decided to take a gondola ride. Here are some pictures of the ride. The minute our gondolier found out Spencer knew Italian he did not stop talking. We asked him to sing but he said no because he would sound terrible. But he did give us a good history of Venice.



The next morning we went to St. Marks Square. It was really busy so we were only there for a short time. But with 3 photographers we got some good pictures of the sites.





Next was the Rialto Bridge, this bridge has shops all over it with just about everything you could think of buying. This picture does a good job of showing you what it is like.



Venice was one of our favorite cities. We loved that at night it was quiet (most of the tourists leave) and the water was so beautiful.