Shaken, not Bored

That's amore.

The beginning of July marks our arrival in Venice - the city of 118 islands, 400 bridges, and countless gondolas. This is the last...

...Wait, what? It's only July 1? Yup, everything you've read about us doing in my sixteen posts since the June 5 post detailing our arrival in Europe has occurred within a mere month. That's a good measure of how fast we moved: sixteen posts means sixteen cities in June, give or take. And I've got seven posts planned after this one to cover the remainder of my international travels. The second month was surely slower because it nearly boils down to a week in Paris, two weeks in Switzerland, and a week in Japan, but I've still got much to tell you. Anyway, where was I...

This is the last city Phil can enjoy at leisure. He does stick with me for Paris, but his time there is brief so he needs to jam as much in as he can before flying home.

One museum featured an artist named Enzo Fiore.
He likes to make portraits, landscapes, and animal bodies.

If you look closely, you can see this guy's shtick is making ALL of his art ENTIRELY out of organic material, including dirt, crickets, beetles, and worms!

A small design museum had a few interesting coffee table pieces to gaze upon.

Venice comes in two parts: the inland boroughs with downtown "Mestre" and the island area for which we all love Venice. The train from Florence dumps you off in Mestre, and since we happily did not pay the premium to sleep on the island, we stayed near our hostel the first night. Downtown isn't exciting, and for a Saturday night it wasn't particularly lively. Just denizens paying cover charges to eat in the square and doing some shopping.

If this photo looks familiar, it's because I initially had it in my Florence post. Whoops.
As I wrote my Venice post, I realized this was the picture I took of the main Mestre square.

Seven days in Italy before getting to Venice, and I'm already dead sick of Italian food. Phil likes Italian, I think, but the high costs got to him. So we went to a Bavarian restaurant in Mestre! Northern Italy is only a thin Austria away from Bavaria anyway, so it wasn't that far-fetched. For 14€, I got heaps of sausage! It was wonderful. Meanwhile, Phil tried to stick with Italian. At the penny-pinching price of 9€, he got a teeny tiny bowl of pasta bolognese. I taunted him then and I'd taunt him again, but I felt bad when his heart broke at the sight of the small bowl, so I gave him some of my sausage which he appreciated. For all the walking we were doing, we both needed to stock up on calories.

A merchant of Venice: this sort of masks and trinkets can be found everywhere on the island.

On the second day, we window-shopped for food and ate random things on the island, including another block of cheese. On the third day, we got Chinese food. After all of Jonathan's efforts training me on real Chinese food, I thought Italian-Chinese to be somewhere in quality between American-Chinese and real Chinese. Cheap and plentiful and tasty though, which was important to us.

Looking toward the Giudecca island

So after the evening in Mestre, we headed out the following day for the island. I think you could walk or bike, but most people will bus or train in. The station on the island is the end of the line though. There are NO land vehicles on the island whatsoever, just gondolas and other boats. The iconic gondolas ask 80€ per ride of up to six passengers, but reportedly you can haggle them down. The romance between me and Phil isn't worth that money so we didn't take a ride.

Our plan on the island was just to walk a closed circuit from the train station to the Giardini della Biennale through the north and then back through the south, and hit as many significant locations as we could. I remembered partway through our tour that the end of Casino Royale was filmed here, so I made it a point to visit a couple spots where Bond exercised his license to kill. Go watch the ending of that movie, and you'll easily recognize this locale.

The CGI floating house became Vesper's grave here, near Rialto Bridge.
Look at me, as debonair as Daniel Craig himself!

Bond sneakily killed a couple baddies here after following Vesper over a bridge, near Piazza San Marco

Some people warned me that Venice smells. I thought it smelled like Auntie Anne's pretzels, or maybe a generic Philly soft pretzel. Is that the smell to which they are referring? Maybe if you connect the smell to hot soft pretzels, you won't think Venice smells so disgusting. You just need to trick your mind that you are smelling pretzels and not polluted canal water.

Basilica di San marco

Griffins at the tops of tall red poles, and the Campanile di San Marco on the right

The Basilica in front of Doge's Palace

A better image of Doge's Palace on the waterfront

Lots of pigeons in Venice, especially in St. Mark's square. And lots of people feed them despite the billion signs not to feed them. We went in a couple free museums. There are a lot of premium museums too but we didn't feel like doing those. Aside from entering museums and riding gondolas, there really isn't much to do in Venice. You just look at old buildings and walk over bridges. These buildings are nice though. Otherwise, enjoy the many views along the Grand Canal.

Another leaning tower? At no point did I know what this building is, couldn't figure it out.

Chiesa di Santa Maria del Giglio

Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo

We crossed Constitution Bridge to get back to the train station and head home.

We left the third and final day in Venice open for whatever we felt like doing, whether we wanted to go back to the island or do miscellany off the island. Turned out there was nothing we really wanted to do. A couple friends of mine said you could do Venice in one day, and they were absolutely right. So we planned the last day around walking an absurd eight miles to the airport, mostly on the side of a road with no shoulder, praying we don't get run over. We split up the walk halfway through with a quick stop at the star fortress Forte Marghera and then an extended lunch in the nearby Parco San Giuliano. It had been hard to find nice fluffy American picnic grass in Europe, but we did discover some under the trees in this park. Europeans don't really believe in grass.

My favorite packaged treat in Europe,
gonna have to see if I can order more.

When it was time to complete the walk to the airport, we got up and headed out in its direction through the large park. However, at the edge of the park in the direction of the airport, it looked entirely fenced off. Rather than double back at the expense of walking more with our big backpacks, we hopped the rusty fence. Humourously, after struggling to get over the fence, we discovered a gate in the fence that we could have easily gone through if only we had walked a hundred feet further before resigning ourselves to hopping the fence.

Aaaayyyyyy! Picnic with cheese curls.

The Venice airport is much nicer than the Heraklion airport. Most airports are much nicer than the Heraklion airport. A two hour evening flight took us to Charles de Gaulle and that would finally conclude our time in Italy. It was OK, all in all. I do not understand why this country is so much more popular of a destination than Greece. The next time you have two weeks off work, spend one in Greece then one in Italy and tell me you didn't like Greece more - c'est impossible.

Time for Paris. Phil leaves, Mike replaces him, Mark appears briefly, I reunite with both Tufts and Brown friends, and I make a handful of new friends.

We're like the models for Kappa.