Day #6 - The perfect day in Venice

Hello again! I'm now writing this post from Milan - the internet cafe in Venice was just too expensive to use for too long! So, now to catch up from 3 days ago... Thursday was a great day in Venice. Not a cloud in the sky - even though all the weather reports we have been obsessively checking had said it would be rainy and cold. We grabbed a brioche (Italian croissant) and bought bananas from the fruit market on the street for breakfast - perfect way to start the day like a local. We headed to St. Marks square again, but this time took the street - luckily there is a main road that goes from our hotel to there, so you don't always have to take the vaporetto. However, the street system in Venice is definitely the craziest we've experienced to date - the streets go every which way, and you have to cross about a dozen canals to get there - but, if you just follow the signs that say Per San Marco, you're just fine. At St. Marks, we started off in the Correr Museum, which is a semi-boring museum of Venetian history. However, it was included in the ticket for other things we wanted to see, so we figured we might as well get our money's worth. Our proudest moment of the day, however, was successfully getting the student discount for our tickets - normally only European students qualified, but when he asked, we said we were studying in Wales and it worked! So, we saved 6 euros on a normally 12 euro ticket. :) After the Correr, we headed across the square to Doge's Palace. A Doge was basically the Duke of Venice back in the day - an appointment made for life, that meant they got to live in the cool palace. The rooms were really cool - lots of painted and gold-covered ceilings, huge ornate halls and rooms used for different political departments, and then below the palace, the prisons where the Doges got to keep prisoners pretty much at their will. We grabbed some lunch from a take-away pizzeria type place and ate it on the square, just people watching. There's enough people there we could spend all day doing just that... But then, after lunch, we did what we both agree has been the most "fun" part of the trip so far - feeding the pigeons!!! You see, there are literally THOUSANDS of pigeons in the square (as mentioned yesterday), so naturally there are plenty of street vendors with bird food. We bought some, and, still a bit timid, stuck our hands out with some food,... and five seconds later were mobbed by 10 pigeons each landing all over our arms and shoulders! :) It took us awhile to get used to it and stop shrieking every time a pigeon landed on us...but man was it fun. We definitely got some GREAT pictures of it too. OK, so after crazy pigeon feeding time, we washed our hands REALLY well and went on to St. Marks cathedral itself. We used Rick Steves' helpful hint to avoid the long line by checking my bag, which meant we got to skip the line. Thank you, Rick Steves. Inside St. Marks we paid to see the treasury, which had cool treasures that had been stolen from Constantinople. After that, we used another Rick Steves tip to see a free glassblowing demonstration. You see, glass is a huge thing in Venice - all the souvenirs are glass items, and they have a whole other little island nearby that is pretty much their glass-making center. But, we saved ourselves a trip to the island by flashing our Rick Steves book and getting our OWN glassmaking show. Then, we got shown into the showroom, where they had all sorts of fancy handmade blown-glass objects for sale. The most expensive thing we saw was this glass horse - for 52,000 euro. Just a bit out of our price range... With all our main sightseeing goals out of the way, we decided to just wander Venice a bit. As Rick Steves says, "80% of the tourists never leave the main path of Venice....but 80% of Venice is in fact not touristy." So, our goal was to see these back streets ... and we definitely did. Narrow streets with no tourists, people hanging their laundry outside their windows...neighborhood shops without tourist trinkets. It was really cool. We made it to the north bank of the island and just sat on a bridge in the sun for a bit. It was really relaxing. We just sat and thought for awhile, and I realized that if I had been home, I would be at Google for the conference right now...but here I am in Venice. Ironic, but I'm definitely happy this way. :) We went back to our hotel for a short siesta and some Italian-MTV watching after that (yes, we do seem to watch a lot of MTV, I know, but it's only because it's the only channel halfway in English!) Then, we went to dinner close to our hotel - and I got the strangest dish I've had yet...I really wanted fish, so I got pasta with fish. But, it ended up having clams in it - still in the shells! I had like 6 shells that I had to pick out of my pasta, and several other unidentifiable seafood objects... hmm. I know this is getting long, but it was that type of day... Next we went to a back street place we had found earlier, that had live swing music that night. It was a cool atmosphere, so we got some house wine (for only 1 euro), and hung out there a bit. Then, we walked back to St. Marks, because we heard it was really cool at night. We got there and it was pretty quiet, but just gorgeous all lit up at night. I bought a crepe, which looked good but I probably shouldn't have - I was sooo full. :) Finally got back at like 11, so it was still a pretty early night. Definitely the perfect day in Venice. :)