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Friday, June 09, 2006

Venice – Day 3 (Wed, June 7)

Another long post! Today I spent the whole day with my new friends that I shared a room with. Allison is from Minnesota and traveling around Italy on her own and Kelly and Daniel are friends from New Mexico going for a Europe trip for a while. We all decided to go to the Basilica San Marco this morning. On our way we stopped by the Rialto Bridge since Kelly and Daniel hadn’t seen it yet.



We arrived at Piazza San Marco and I told them about feeding the pigeons so we all had to try it this time! It was a lot of fun!



We then waited in the short line for the Basilica and it was beautiful inside! I snuck 2 blurry pics but it doesn’t do it justice. The ceiling is all mosaic and the pieces of glass are sooo tiny! I must have taken decades to finish it! It is mostly a gold ceiling too so it sparkles when the light hits it. We paid 3 euro to go upstairs to the museum and the lookout deck (there was one for inside and outside). While I was taking pictures my camera totally froze on me! I couldn’t turn it of either, it was just stuck on with the lens open and the screen frozen, so I was so scared that I’d loose the hundreds of pics I took on that memory card. The rest of the time I had to hold the camera in my hand because it would get wrecked if I put it in my purse with the lens open.



After the Basilica we all decided to go back to the hostel and then we planned to go to some of the islands in the lagoon. Kelly and Daniel wanted to go to Lido to the beach and Allison and I decided to go to Murano known for it’s glass sculptures and artisans. My camera’s battery eventually died on the way to the hostel, so it was safe for me to take it out. I charged it a little and put it back in and it started working again thank goodness!!! I switched memory cards though just so I could be sure the pics I already took would be safe. Anyways, we all decided to meet up again at the hostel at 8pm to go out for dinner.

Allison and I bought a 24hr Vaporetto pass (Vaporetto are like buses but on water) and took a half hour ride to the island of Murano. We wanted to go to a glass museum that was on Murano but we didn’t find it (we had no map) so we looked in the many glass showrooms and shops. I saw a really cool necklace that I had never seen anywhere else, so beautiful! I was a glass pendant and it looked like the galaxy was in the pendant: little bits of reflective sparkly glass in the center. It was a little more than I wanted to pay though, so I decided not to get it (earlier in the day I bought a small and beautiful mask and they aren’t cheap).



We took a ferry back to the Piazza area and headed back to the hostel to meet for dinner. We got totally lost!! So disoriented that we past the same area twice while we thought we wer going in the right direction! It was pretty funny! We finally made it 20mins late.



The 4 of us walked toward the Dorsoduro area since they hadn’t seen it yet and stopped at a restaurant right on one of the canals. We all shared some wine and had good food. I tried a Venetian specialty: pasta dyed black with squid ink. It was so good! It had pieces of squid (I think that’s what it was) with spaghetti and it was pitch black and dyed my whole mouth black too!



After dinner we walked further to a square called Campo San Margherita. This is near a university, so there were a bunch of café/bars open and lots of people out and about. We sat outside and had a drink and talked to some other people some from America and one from Canada. They had been living in Venice for about 3 years now! We had some gelato too and then headed back and got home about 12:30 (lockout is 1am).

Daniel, Kelly, and Allison

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