Venice - Tuesday

We aren’t snapping into the time zone as fast as normal. Both awake at 2:30 AM. Decided to pop a Benadryl (to which Bruce is normally immune) and found ourselves sleeping till 9:30. A quick trip to a nearby bakery brought rolls, croissants, and the like. Then we figured out how to use the espresso pot in the kitchen. There are four of them there, in different sizes. We chose large, and we made two pots full. All vowed to buy one of these to bring home.

Interesting views of the traffic in the canal beneath our window. All manners of commerce and trade in addition to the tourism. Watched a remodeling contractor sawing wood for a nearby job while standing in his boat. No OSHA here! It was trash day in our neighborhood, so we got to watch it being collected in carts, no doubt to be further loaded into boats on its way to the dump. Lots of other carts making deliveries to shops and restaurants.

Our house is the salmon colored one in the center of the picture below. The windows with the window boxes are ours.

Rehab contractor at work. Note electric cord running through water in the bottom of the boat.

Then we headed off to the Rialto Market and the nearby Rialto Bridge across the Grand Canal.

Then to St. Mark’s Square to watch the pigeons assemble when the clock struck noon. There wasn’t as impressive a show of them as Bruce remembers from 1967, but it was still something to see. And there were still people doing silly things with pigeons.

We walked a few blocks to get out of the deeply touristy area and had a nice lunch. Just as we were wrapping it up we found ourselves adopted by an older woman from Glasgow, quite frail, and in need of navigational assistance to get back to her tour group. We gave her a map, marked her destination on it, and sent her off in hopes that she would make it OK.

Then back to our apartment for siesta. It’s actually written in the info sheet here that we aren’t to make loud noises between 1 and 3 in the afternoon! We slept a bit longer than that.

Then back toward the center of town to an Internet café that Karin and Dan had spotted yesterday. Not many of these around. We had to show passports, which they copied, and we were advised that the police would get lists of all the sites we visited!

No significant e-mail. No bidding war on our house yet. Managed to upload yesterday’s blog after working through the Italian instructions in otherwise familiar applications.

Higher class shops in this part of town. There had been a certain sameness to many of the shops that we passed earlier in the day—lots of carnival masks and glass pieces. Bought tights for the grandkids. Another delightful dinner. Very jovial waiter. Walk back to apartment. Karin and Dan are doing very well at guiding us through the maze of alleys and passageways. There's not enough sky view for GPS down there.