Venice

Well, I am finally getting around to writing a post about Venice. Usually at this point I wouldn’t bother writing about things that are so far gone, but this experience was way too great not to post about.

When we got to Venice I was completely depressed. I know, I know, I was in one of the most magical cities in the world and I was crying my eyes out! Sad, but true. I got over it pretty quickly though. How can this be? Right? Well, I had just left one of the best cities I had ever been to, had been staying at a beautiful hotel and sat for six hours on a train to arrive in this eery little harbor city that was drenched in rain and the forecast projected that it would be like that the whole time we were there. So I was a little bit more than disappointed.

 After a ten minute breakdown on the bed of my hostel, being comforted by Curtis of course, I sucked it up, changed my clothes and made my way out into the magical/eery little city of Venice, Italy. I was satisfied to find that even in the rain it was quite an enchanting city and we enjoyed walking around in the daylight that was left that day. It helped that we found an amazing café to eat at which we ended up eating at twice during our three days in Venice.

The second day we woke up to cloudy skies, but no rain. The forecast had changed for the day and it showed showers only in the evening. So we were pumped up as we headed out for what turned out to be a really great day!

We bought a boat pass for the day and headed over to St. Mark’s Square by way of the Grand Canal. The boat ride alone was quite lovely. We were beginning to really understand the appeal of Venice as we rode down the Grand Canal to St. Mark’s.

We got to St. Mark’s and it was an absolutely beautiful Basilica, unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures inside, but the outside itself was incredible.

After the Basilica we headed up the bell tower for an amazing view of the whole city, this is the view of St. Mark’s Square from the tower.

When we finished at the Bell tower we decided to feed the pigeons. These guys were crazy, if you gave them the tiniest crumb they would jump all over you! I love birds, so I actually kind of liked it.

After that we headed over to the island of Murano where they make amazing Murano glass. It was a beautiful island, maybe even more enchanting than Venice in some ways. It was small and quaint and they had a huge variety of beautiful things made of their ever so famous Murano glass.

After Murano, we headed over to Burano, I know, the names rhyme, hahaha, funny funny. I am not sure why they rhymed, but I do know that they were a lot alike, except for the fact that the houses on Burano were all very brightly colored and beautiful. The other thing I am aware of is that my photo of Burano is not very beautiful. That was completely my fault, since I forgot to fully recharge the battery, which almost led to breakdown #2 in Venice, until Curtis found a nice restaurant with some good wine 

We got our full worth of the boat pass that day using it two more times after our return to Venice. We made our way back to St. Mark’s square to search for a restaurant that my sister had been to in Venice.

After a little bit of a lengthy search, we found this beautiful little piece of heaven called Rafaelles, right on the canal where the gondolas pass by. It was nice to be there, at a place where my sister had eaten about a year before. At this point I hadn’t seen my sister Angela for two years, or any of my family for that matter, so it felt good to be connected in this way with her.

The next day in Venice we spent our time exploring the island. We walked around basically all day, we spent about six hours or more exploring the island, we figure that we spent a total of about four hours just walking around and seeing different things. Not a bad work out at all 

We took breaks of course, cappuccino breaks

gelato breaks

We saw some great things while we were walking including this beautiful church

We also got a chance to climb up this great bamboo sculpture, that was kind of like every kids dream.

It even had a cool hangout at the top with pillows and really chill music playing. It was quite interesting. You can read more about it here.

For our last dinner in Venice we actually went back to the same restaurant that we were at the first night. It was really good food, the service was great and so was the location. So we ate there one last time and reminisced about our time in Italy.

Overall we had an amazing time in Italy, the sights were beautiful, the people were friendly, the food was amazing and the company was wonderful! I think that one of my favorite things about Italy was the Gelato though