It's very surreal here. Everything is by boat including busses, taxis, ambulances and rubbish trucks! There are a lot of shops selling fancy masks, murano glass and fashion. Oh, and leather! Our first stop was the realto bridge. The biggest bridge with shops on top of it running over the grand canal. It's not unlike ponte vecchio in florence in that sense I suppose. Next we hit up San Marco square but I'd forgotten to pack my scarf and had on a sleeveless dress (duh it was 30C!) so we couldn't go into the church. Instead we just admired the buildings and then got a drink nearby (Daniel a beer and myself a Bellini which is popular here). We then walked back to the b&b and had dinner at the family restaurant as 6 or so hours had passed!! After dinner we decided to go for an evening stroll to see some parts of the city lit up and to get some supplies from the supermarket for breakfast (pictured below - yay summer berries again!). We got home late, about 10:30 so hit the hay immediately. Unfortunately I randomly woke up at 2am with food poisoning again!!! Definitely the same one as I was only sick once. My body is struggling to shake it because its tired I think. Luckily I slept through the rest of the night and have only been nauseous after food today, not being sick.
Today we slept in and then went back to San Marco to go into St. Marks church! It's pretty cool in there. The floor and ceilings are all completely mosiaced. Some in gold. We then went to the dukes palace which is now a museum but still has the elaborate rooms. It featured political areas such as meeting rooms for councils and the senate. It also has a cool prison underneath which was a little hard for me to walk around but also my favourite bit. It'd be great to play laser tag in haha, very winding and enclosed bridges over canals. By buying entrance to the dukes palace we also got 3 other free museums which were all in a huge building together so we quickfired all 3; archaeological, renaissance art and some plush rooms from the 17/18th century for an empress. It then started to rain heavily so we got a relatively early dinner at 6 of gnocchi and an awesome semi frozen chocolate mousse concoction. It's now 8pm and we're just going to spend the night inside as its very wet outside. We have a bottle of limoncello from the supermarket to keep us company.
Cee x
We slept in the following day, and after lunch at the nice cafe we'd found the day before headed over to the Peggy Guggenheim museum which houses a lot if modern art (more Picasso's per square inch than any other museum I've been to!). She was a New York socialite who loved art and bought a giant mansion (with a garden!) on the grand canal. So great art and great views! Afterwards we tried to retrace my steps during my last visit and find the best gelato I've ever had.... we found the shop but the gelato was half ice cream and awful :( lost to ravages of time I guess (and recession!) we then walked around the outside of the southern suburb of Dorsoduro and spotted a giant as cruise ship moseying through the canal between Guiedecca and Dorsoduro. Looked out of place as it was twice as tall as the buildings!
We made our way back through San Marco to the suburb of Castello where a lot of locals live and few tourists go. It had a nice quiet feel (till they started singing Kareoke..) oddly the Italian restaurant was run by Chinese but hey - it was cheap! We walked along the canal side till it got dark then took a boat cruise back to our B&B, well... Ok we took the Vaporetto water bus ;) but it was nice!
Cee enjoyed the bus ride so much we took a ride up and down the canal the following day! We had a bit of travel ahead of us so we quickly grabbed some lunch and jumped on the train, first to Bologna, then on to Ancona to catch our cruise liner (low cost ferry ;) ) to Croatia!
It was poorly signposted and poorly explained by the ferry company (well, 'Low Cost!' is their motto...) so it took us an hour dragging our bags around in the 33 degree heat to get checked in and boarded but we got there in the end!
On to Split in Croatia!
Dan
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