Venice - Wednesday

Another breakfast of pastries from the nearby bakery, accompanied by espresso. Karin and Dan had had a night out on the town and chose not to join us, so we left food out for them.

Wandered around our neighborhood for a couple of hours. Found a nearby grocery store and stocked up on a few items, including lunch materials. Lunch of cheese, crackers, chips, salad, plums, and a bottle of da Vinci Chianti-which Cathy (née Vinci) says is her wine at home, but cheaper there!

K&D still non-responsive. So the rest of us head off toward the Rialto bridge. Find the Internet café and spend an exasperating time there. The AOL mail account which we were using on the trip refused to work despite working fine yesterday. Videos took forever to upload. Finally pressed the blog’s ‘Publish’ button at the last second before time ran out. Will check tomorrow to see if it succeeded.

Vaporetto ride from there to San Marco. It’s right at the end of the Grand Canal, where it opens up to the sea. Walk along the edge of the water for quite a ways just taking in the sights. Then back to San Marco, watch people playing with pigeons, look at the architecture. Weather very pleasant today. Cooler than yesterday and the sun not so bright.

Walk back toward our apartment. Did great till we missed the turn down a tiny alley, so had to backtrack a little bit. K&D gone, but left a note saying that they had a tale to tell! We await the story! Meanwhile, it’s relax time. Fortunately we purchased enough beer, wine, and snack food earlier in the day, so we are well provisioned for good relaxation. Watching traffic on the canal. This seems to be the route home for the gondoliers at the end of their day.

Karin and Dan returned with tales of closing a few bars, meeting some students, a water taxi ride that appeared to be heading out into open sea, and a return to our apartment at 4 AM!

Mom here. Dan and Karin and Cathy went out for a ghost walk tour. Bruce and I went out scout out a short cut to the nearest plaza or ‘campo.’ It is a pleasant place even after dark. Lots of dogs taking their owners for a walk. It is quite challenging to learn to get places in the city as the streets are all alley-sized (but all clean), and they twist and turn and dead end. The bridges over the canals all have steps, so our calves are speaking to us now on day 3. We get places by memorizing the goods for sale in the windows...like “turn at the glove store, then right after the hardware store with the roller wheel display, then left after the underwear store, straight past the stationery store and kitty corner thru ‘Ben Franklin Square.’” (There is a statue there of the playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) wearing exactly the style of clothes of Ben, plus he presents the shape of the man as we know him.) Do that about 30 times and we are at the Rialto bridge which connects to the other side of town.

We are learning our neighborhood. I spoke all Italian at the bakery this morning. There are 2 TVs in the apartment but all channels in Italian, so we sit in the living room (rather than the TV room) and read, or sit on the window ledge and watch the boats go by. Some are gondolas; most are work boats carrying bricks, dirt, hotel laundry, groceries. A lot have dogs riding on the bow!! They are gutting a building across the canal from our building, so workmen are heaving out the contents into a boat. Noisy and lively. We are near a canal crossroads too so all boats have to blow a horn or shout a warning to avoid collisions.