Level 2-2: Venice

Howdy again everybody! Did you have a good night's sleep? What did you have for breakfast this morning? Is Amazing Race Australia any good? These are the questions we all must ask ourselves as human beings - well, okay, maybe not. I just thought I'd find out how Australia's doing, before I go back to writing about Italy.

Monday 11th

We left Milan early in the morning to catch a train to Venice. We'd booked seats 61, 62, 63 and 68, making many jokes about forcing someone to sit in the 'naughty corner' by themselves. This is what we found:

And if you can explain how this makes any sense, I'll buy you something nice.

Our fears of isolation dispersed, the others got right down to the important business: sleeping for three hours. I watched the Italian countryside go by... evidently I need to practice sleeping whenever possible. We arrived in Venice at 9:25 - three minutes slow, tut tut!

At the train station we soon learned that there would be no free toilets anywhere - this didn't worry me too much as years of go-camping-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, the-only-toilet's-full-of-redbacks Scouting had taught me a kidney-destroying level of bladder control. After buying three day passes for the vaporetto service (public transport boats, Venice's bus equivalent), we managed to find our hostel despite the Google Maps directions we had showing us the completely wrong place. Seriously, it wasn't even on the right side of the river. It's a wonder how we managed to get there at all.

Leaving our bags, we bought lunch from a nearby supermarket then found our way to San Marco Piazza on foot, crossing the Rialto Bridge and checking out all the souvenir stalls. We couldn't go in anything that day as Janet and Yve were "indecent" - you could see their knees.

So inappropriate it blurs photos. (Actually, I was just trying to take a picture of the dog in the corner.)

Having exhausted ourselves taking pictures of everything we saw, it was back to the hostel for a fantastic dinner of gorgonzola risotto, a second course which I can't remember but was definitely very nice, and berry pie. It was so nice it almost made up for the fact that it was 40 minutes late. I also had to ask them to put another bed together in a corner of the room because they'd overbooked. Oh well. At least the bathroom was reasonably clean.

Tuesday 12th

Day two. With our shoulder-and-knee-covering clothes we were suitably suitable to enter the Doge's Palace, one of those remarkably beautiful places where you couldn't take photos. (There's a lot of those.) So here's a picture of the exterior:

And one of the interior:

See the ceiling there? Imagine all the walls and floors look like that as well. Then you will have absolutely no idea of what it looked like.

Three hours later we'd made our way around the entire building and headed next door to the Basilica. This was the first place we encountered where the floor had purely geometric patterns, with no pictures or areas of plain marble. Interestingly, a lot of the scenes on the walls were mosaics, rather than the paintings which adorned virtually every other surface of every other place we visited.

We ate lunch, then sat by the Grand Canal and wrote postcards - at least I managed to send those ones; to everyone still waiting for a piece of card from Germany or England, I have no excuse whatsoever - then boated our way to the Accademia gallery, which was free for Cultural Week. Score! It was interesting to see not only paintings with religious themes, but also historical scenes of Venice. What felt most surreal was a painting from the 17th Century with the Basilica we had just visited an hour before.

Several hundred years ago, painters practised for decades in order to capture the beauty of sights like this. I took this picture in less than a second. I win.

From the Accademia we went straight back to the Piazza to visit Museo Correr, which had a lot of ancient things like ceramics, weaponry, statues, coins and bronzes. Then it was back to the hostel for another yummy and unfashionably late dinner before our last day in Venice.

Wednesday 13th

Our final day in Venice was largely spent in Murano, a small island a bit further away. We passed the cemetary island; we considered visiting on the way back, but didn't have time by the end of it. The first thing we encountered when off the boat was a spruiker encouraging people to go to a glass-making presentation, so naturally we went to have a look.

You know how fire gives off more light the hotter it is? Yep.

After perusing the far-out-of-our-price-range shop connected to the workshop - and chatting to the shop assistant, who had been to Moonee Ponds - we set about visiting the hundreds of glass stores along the main canal. There was everything from jewellery and animal figurines to chandeliers and an actual-size ornamental guitar.

Only slightly less entertaining than an actual orchestra.

Eventually we had finished shopping and made our way back to the mainland, stocking up on food from the supermarket, finding gelati and resting in the Accademia before taking another vaporetto to Lido. We would finish our stay in Venice on the beach.

That is, if we weren't run over by the cars and buses we had forgotten to look out for. Eighteen years of living in a city with automobiles, and it only took 2 ½ days to erase it all.

Salad-and-cheese rolls and strawberries later, it was time to head back to Venice to catch our overnight train to Rome. We found our cabin in the train, puzzled over our fold-out beds, sourced blankets from a train official, and said goodbye to Venice.

So, apart from all the amazing buildings which we couldn't take photos of, what did we see in Venice?

Next stop, Rome!