Woke up this morning and found that we had docked in Venice and zones were already being called to get off the ship, but we are taking our own bags off and I’m going to make them kick me off anyway. We went up on deck to see Venice for the first time and found it covered in snow.
This is not the usual site in Venice, so we got some good pictures of it and went down to breakfast. Kay and Richard were down there and we were able to have one last meal together. I assumed that we would continue to run into people from the ship all through our time together because there are only so many spots we would all gravitate too. We drug our bags off the ship and said goodbye to our cabin steward before going it alone. We got on the people mover to the square to get vaporetto cards. These are the water buses that pass for public transportation when the whole city sits in water.
I had to pay cash for the cards and that means that we need a bank again, which leads me to my first rant of the day in a day that had so many: why do we not have this chip that Europeans do in their credit cards that would allow us to use our cards over here? I know that we have the technology in the US, I think that it is just a scam so that they can get us to have to use ATMs over here and they can charge us extra in the exchange fee and ATM use. We go through cash like water over here because you can’t use your debit or credit cards for anything.
Moving on, I got the 3 day use cards for tourists that would allow us to use all the travel lines which was 100 Euro for John and I and I see the other part of being off the boat. I’m going to have to pay for things again like all of my meals and hotels and stuff. I have been spoiled by the ship taking care of my every need. We get on the waterbus and get to the stop that the book recommended for our hotel and pull luggage over bridges, down walkways and as we’re going, I think and most likely say, “Here we go again with Venice being the bane of my existence” and we finally get to the hotel in the Castello section of Venice after asking someone at a café because Venice has no addresses and rhyme or reason for numbers that they put up on buildings. It is the easiest city in the world to get lost in and I’m sure that we will have several times that we don’t know where we are.
Upon arriving at our destination, the hotel manager states that we were expected on the 21st and it is now the 22nd and our rooms have been given away. I am now told that it is Friday and not Thursday which is when I thought that we would get off the boat. I mean, it’s an 18 day cruise and we got on the ship on Monday, Feb 4. When would you think that you would first need a hotel in Venice? Thanks to Carnival for not leaving Miami until midnight on the 4th which makes it an 18 day cruise that ends on the 19th day since leaving. Again, here comes the same experience that I had in Venice as a college student where they just make life a living hell, except, our hotel manager says that he will find us rooms, makes one call, and says that he will take us to the new place which is 50 feet from the current place. We are welcomed with open arms by Marina, our new hotel manager, and we are told that our money already paid will suffice to cover our rooms for the two nights and all we need to pay is the city tax. The manager of the place we had booked said that we could come back to his place for breakfast or stay at the current place and the new manager offered us our choice of rooms. This was a distinctly different experience from my last Venice time when the same thing happened to me and Emily 18 years ago.
I did screw us out of a day in Venice, the cost of one night in the hotel, and the extra day on the vaporetto pass, but luckily we have a place to stay for the next two nights. We were able to drop our bags, get very explicit directions from Marina on how to get to the Rialto bridge and St. Mark’s square for the first stops in Venice. We were able to negotiate the bridges and twisting streets to Rialto, which was covered in tourists and souvenir stands like it was summer. I was surprised how many people were in Venice in the dead of winter. We went on to St. Mark’s and went into the church which had beautiful mosaics and an undulating floor. We decided against paying the money to go into the ducal palace, but got a picture of the bridge of sighs that prisoners would enter the prison through when sentenced by the doge. We ran into a couple of people from the ship who had gone to Pisa with us and then took the number one Vaporetto down the Grand Canal to get a watery, overcast view of the palaces along the canal. The bank that is an affiliate of our one in the states was at the Accadamie stop and we decided to go ahead and see the museum while we were there because it was sooooooo cold.
Now, I know that we get snow in Michigan and temperatures much lower than we were experiencing in Venice, with wind chill and all that, but this was a bone chilling cold. You couldn’t feel your face within seconds of stepping outside, the wind cut through your pants and everyone in Venice is walking around in full length furs to keep out the cold. And you needed it. I realized that in Michigan, I go from my house, to my car, to the office, to the car, to the arena, to the car, to the house and never wander around looking at things when it is this cold. Well, you can’t not see Venice when you’re there because it is cold, so we tried to hit the museum and hope that it warmed up later in the visit. We went through the museum and had trouble figuring out how to move through the exhibits, were sad because the big Titian was being refurbished, but there were a ton of Veronese, Tintoretto, and Bellini’s to call it a successful visit, but again, like all other places in Italy, no photo. So, I would love to show you our view of these masterpieces, but, alas, no.
We returned to the hotel through St. Marks Square at night which was pretty and we got sight of our ship being towed past St. Marks to go to Trieste for dry dock. It was all lit up and very pretty to see in a canal that I didn’t think that it would ever fit into. We got a pizza to go and ate at the hotel while catching up on sleep, email, and tried to regroup what was important to see in the next day since we were not going to have the3 days in Venice that we expected. But after a very bad middle day with no hotel, we were able to salvage the day and see a lot of sights in the time that we had.
Day 2 in Venice of 3 that we were supposed to spend here, but Jo screwed up
Last night, trying to go to sleep even though it feels like I’m swallowing shards of glass because I caught John’s sore throat, I wondered how long it can take one to die of frostbite from the bottom of your feet. If anyone has tried to walk on marble floors in Venice in winter, you know that this seems to be possible. I can stand by the bed and while the rest of my body is clearly not freezing, I think that I might die from the sheer amount of blood that my body will try to send to my heart and brain because it thinks that the cold on my feet is going to creep up the rest of me at some point. It also takes approximately 20 minutes under the covers again before your feet get back to the temperature of an ice cube in order to allow you to sleep after a trip to the bathroom across said floor. Now you may be thinking, “Jo, why didn’t you put on some socks?” and I tell you, wise one, that I had on my socks this whole time. This diatribe is with socks on people!!!! So, now, I can see why people in Michigan put carpet in bathrooms even though this is against all conventional wisdom.
We arose with light coming through the window shutters and no alarm clock or Noonan talking to us about what to do on the ship that day for the first time in 18 days. If I didn’t mention it before, Noonan was our cruise director on the Destiny and a total goofball. Imagine John Scott Gray as a cruise director and there you go…. We got ourselves moving by about 8:30 and had a lovely breakfast in our hotel that wasn’t expecting us with croissants, cheese, yogurt, cereal, nutella, and butter. In short, the perfect European breakfast and talked with the hotel’s housekeeper who is Romanian. She speaks good English, but still worries that she is not grammatically correct in her speech. We need to start an ad campaign that says that we don’t care if you can speak coherently at all, we’re just glad you know some English because we’re Americans and we can’t extend ourselves to learning a foreign language before traveling extensively in your country, so that all of these people feel confident in throwing out what they’ve got so we find out some information. Anyway, she states that she wants to go back to Romania because the Italians are so “cold” and they are not helpful. Now, this was employee talking about boss on top of honest observation of an entire country’s population. We’ll take it with a grain of salt, but it’s spot on at some times.
We tell our hotel manager that we are going to see Murano, Burano, and Torcello today before leaving and she again circles things on our map and helps us on our way in a very helpful, friendly way (in direct contradiction to her employee’s insights) and we take off. But being the types of tourists that we are, we stop in the church of St John and Paul right by the hotel where all the doges of Venice are buried. This church rocketed up to number one church in the world in my book. Imagine if we took all the presidents and buried them in one place, gave them all elaborate funeral sculptures, Murano stained glass narratives, and paintings by Titian and Veronese around them with frescos and soaring buttresses.
That’s pretty much what this was and it was a testament to how an empire can rise and fall in a few centuries. Best thing, I don’t think there was one other non-Italian tourist in the place (and there were only about 10 of the Italian tourists there). So, two hours later, we return to the hotel to put down some of our booty, go to the bathroom (because that is going to cost you anywhere else in Venice) and tell our hotel manager that we haven’t made it to the islands yet. Hence, why John and I can not see a city or even a bit of city in one day.
Back out with resolve to not be distracted by anymore diversions and we catch the vaporetto out to the islands. My main objective was a tiny island out in the lagoon, Torcello, which is the first island to be settled and still has the oldest church on it. We raced across Murano to catch the boat out to Burano and Torcello without seeing any glass at all pretty much, but made the boat. We were able to wander around Burano with all of its lace offerings, but we weren’t tempted by the ones in our price range and the truly spectacular hand made ones were well out of our range. We went in Emilia which has pictures of all the celebrities who own their stuff and it was all beautiful, but 700 Euro for a set of placemats and a table runner is out of our league.
We were able to find a pastry shop that our favorite travel guide mentioned and it was shear heaven. I made John take a picture of me indulging in the last pastry that we had from the shop because these were unbelievably good. I have never purchased something so mundane looking, like a tiny cannoli, and had such bliss when it first hit my tastebuds. People, this was groan out loud as you take a bite pastry and it wasn’t just me, I thought John was going to have a crisis. On to Torcello, which had a wedding getting out as we came toward the church, which was fun to witness. Not too impressed after earlier things today and we got the next boat back to Murano. I was tempted to get my pastries when we stopped on Burano, but controlled myself (or rather John forbad me to go and get some more).
Murano was glass shop upon glass shop upon glass shop. There were some that you could go in and watch the glass worker at work and the cold drove us in there more than a desire to see how the glass was made. When there is a working furnace inside the store, it is vastly warmer than these tiny islands with the wind off the Adriatic whipping across them. I couldn’t believe that these islands were even colder than Venice, but they were and it was starting to get miserable to be out in it. We went into various shops and saw beautiful pieces that we couldn’t afford in this lifetime and then ugly things that we could afford, but didn’t want. Then, in one shop, there was a platter of glass cherries. They look great in a huge pile on the platter, but that would cost too much, so John and I have two glass cherries from Murano. I thought that they were appropriate because they were A: affordable and B: kind of reminded me of Michigan as does the weather.
Back on the vaporetto to go see the Arsenale, which is the boat yard that takes up a third of Venice and was the source of their Empire. We got to go past the waterside entrance to it and it was impressive as well as going past Santa Maria della Salute and San Georgio de Maggiore which lined the entrance to the customs house before you got to sail into the quay at St. Marks. And, I don’t want to hear from anyone how I’m butchering these spellings because I don’t have time to make sure that I’m spelling everything correctly, or the blog won’t be two days late from what we’re doing, it will be a year late most likely. Upon reaching the Arsenale stop to see it from the land, it had started to rain and this was a cold soaking rain. We decided on retreat and went back to the hotel to dry off and eat at a restaurant that had been recommended near the hotel. Our hotel had filled up with international visitors and while we were working in the outer room, the dutch couple came in at about 10pm and said that acqua alta was starting. This is the fall season of high water that was supposed to be over for Venice, but with the snow melt and this rain, everything was rising again. We put on outerwear again to go out and see what had happened to the little canal that came into the entrance of our hotel and it was significant rise. In the picture it is coming up the stairs, but earlier in the day, there were at least 3 stairs visible before you hit water and there was no way now for a gondola or little kayak to make it under the bridge beside the hotel. It was a good lesson in how much Venice is at risk with the rising sea levels.
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