Venice, Aug. 5, 2012

Aug. 5, 2012
Venice, Italy

We’re in Venice! But the less said about our flight over here, the better.
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The next time we have an overnight flight, I really think we’re going to have to splurge on first class and get a sleeping pod. It’s impossible to sleep in a cramped, upright economy seat. Plus the food is probably better in first class.

Venice is beautiful, but all of our friends who’ve been here before were right – in August, it’s just as hot and humid as it is in Chicago, and it’s very crowded. After we checked into our hotel (the Hotel Bel Sito in the Campo Santa Maria del Giglio), Gary and I went for a walk to the Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square) to find an ATM and browse around. We found it was very hard to navigate the narrow cobblestone streets because they’re just teeming with tourists of all nationalities, many with young children in strollers. As for the heat, we had to take two showers today – one in the morning and one in the evening. I wish I had been able to book a tour later in the year in September or October when it’s cooler and supposedly less crowded in Italy, but all of the Go Ahead tours for this particular trip were already fully booked for those months. I guess other tourists besides me are catching on to that, so maybe it wouldn’t be less crowded here in the fall after all.

Venice is still beautiful, though. It really is a city built on water. It’s actually a group of 118 small islands in a shallow lagoon that are separated by 177 canals and connected by more than 400 bridges. In the older central section of the city where we’re staying, the canals act as roads and all transportation is on foot or by boat. We had to take a pretty wild water-taxi ride over here from Marco Polo International Airport on the mainland. The only place where motor vehicles are allowed is on the northern edge of the city, where they recently built parking facilities and a road to the mainland.

The architecture here is incredible. Venice was a very wealthy center of trade and commerce during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance because of its access to the seas, so many of the buildings, especially the churches and civic facilities, are very lavishly decorated in the Gothic style with elaborate sculpture, gilding, and bright paint. And of course, there is always the sound of bells ringing from the many church bell towers.

Everyone here speaks pretty good English, so I haven’t had much of a chance to use the Italian phrases I taught myself before we got here. I say “Ciao”, “Grazi,” and “Buon giorno” a lot just to show I’m making an effort, and I did ask a booth vendor how much something cost in Italian (“Quanto costa?”). But they seem to know you’re American as soon as they hear your accent and launch right into English, so you can usually get by with that.

Later on, our tour group had an introductory meeting and went out to dinner at a local restaurant (Taverna dei Dogi on Calle Albanesi near the Ponte dei Sospiri or “Bridge of Sighs”) with our tour director Monique Verloo, who is a pretty interesting person. She’s half Belgian, half Italian, but was born in the States, so she holds dual citizenship and speaks several languages. She lives in Rome during the summer as a Go Ahead tour director and in Pennsylvania during the winter as an architectural historian, and also teaches Aviation English to Italian pilots and air traffic controllers.

There are about 25 or 30 people in our group, including a family from New Jersey, but mostly middle-aged women traveling with friends or family members. The exception is two young girls in their late teens or early 20s, Jennifer and Ali, who just happen to have grown up and gone to school in Manhattan, Illinois, which is only about 10 miles from New Lenox, where we live. Talk about a small world!

Italians sure do like to eat. At dinner tonight, we were served four courses (first lasagna, then salad, then rosemary roasted chicken, then gelato with fruit), which Monique says is pretty standard for most Italian dinners. Yet all of the Italians I’ve seen so far have been skinny! How do they do it? (On second thought, it must be all the walking they do here. Let’s see what they look like in Florence.) All of the food was excellent!

The bread (which Monique says comes with every meal and for which you are charged whether you eat it or not so you might as well eat it) was in the form of hard, crusty rolls and was served without any butter or olive oil, so at first we weren’t sure how we were expected to eat it. They gave us butter when we asked for it, but later I saw Monique using her roll to mop up the meat sauce on the lasagna, so I guess that’s how the locals eat it. (We found out later that it’s considered very “lower class” here to eat your bread with butter. Maybe it’s that way for Italians, but for Americans it’s just the custom we’ve grown up with.)

They also do not serve tap water at restaurants in Italy. If you ask for water, you get a bottle of mineral water, which is available in either “sparkling” or “still.” They also refer to it as “with gas” (sparkling) or “without gas” (still), which caused some confusion the first time we were asked. I thought maybe they were enquiring about the state of our digestion instead of our water preference. (For the record, Gary and I prefer our mineral water – and our digestive systems -- without gas.)

After dinner, Gary and I went for a nightcap at a little place that Monique recommended called Sangal, a contemporary-style restaurant and lounge bar with a great outdoor terrace on the roof. It’s in a square called Campo San Gallo on a side alley and over a stone bridge off of the Piazza San Marco. (Most of the restaurants, shops, and cafés directly on the square are very expensive, so it’s always best to find something on the side streets.) We liked it so much we’ll probably go back there for dinner tomorrow night.

While we were looking for the bar, we also ran into an American couple from North Dakota on the bridge who asked us to take a picture of them, and to make sure that we got the Hard Rock Café in the background. (It must be mandatory now for every popular tourist spot in the world to have a Hard Rock Café.) When we said we were from Chicago, the guy said “Go Bears!,” which was nice to hear. When Gary asked him if he preferred the Cubs or the White Sox, he said he wasn’t much of a baseball fan, but if he had to pick he’d go with the White Sox. This is exactly how Gary and I feel, so it’s another case of “a small world.”