CN Tower
Niagara Falls
Golden Gate
Mt. Fuji
Great Wall
Grand Canyon
Hoover Dam
Pyramids
Petra
Colosseum
Leaning Tower
Parthenon
Stonehenge
Big Ben
The Chunnel
Eiffel Tower
Mt. St.Michel
Empire St Bld

Alaska glacier
Tokyo Tower
Forbidden City
Sum'r Palace
LaBufadora
Bilbao Museo
BlarneyStone
Disney Paris

Venice

With its gondolas cruising canals, Venice is at once serene and hectic. You couldn’t tell it’s Wonder-light with its mobs of tourists getting lost in its street mazes to see its major landmarks: the Campanile and St. Mark’s Basilica at San Marco Square.

After checking out this Web site, my excited-to-see-Italy friend Jen flies in from LA to join me in Venice, and then tour the rest of Italy.  It’s Jen’s first time in Italy, so we do the grand tour.

San Marco Square
San Marco Square is the huge plaza at the center of town, featuring the Campanile, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace, half the tourists in Italy, and more pigeons that fly by your face which must’ve inspired Hitchcock’s The Birds.

San Marco Basilica
The renovations of the mosaics on the front of the Basilica are finished and look great.  We venture inside to check out the treasury (euphemism for “war-booty”) and the original four horse statues.

Campanile
We climb the huge clock tower (€ 6) for a great bearings-getting view of the city.  Fortunately, we avoid the ear-splitting chimes by splitting just before the huge bells’ hourly chime.

Doge’s Palace
While I’ve been to Venice twice before, I hadn’t ever been to Doge’s Palace so we check it out (€ 9.50).  By the way, doge (mayor) is

pronounced ”doh-zhay,” not “doggie” like my brothers and I joked around on our previous trip.  The palace features the Doge’s Apartment, including his huge map room.  It’s cool to see their old-fashioned map murals, painted on the walls the size of billboards.  We even see one map with California on it (the maps were updated later on).  We then climb up to the Senate Room, featuring the largest oil painting in the world (which gets an honorary Wonder-Art award cause it’s pretty impressive). 

We cross the Bridge of Sighs, and look out through the little barred windows which were the palace prisoners’ last chance to see daylight (sigh!) before heading down into the Prisons.   The maze of small stone prisons, is pretty creepy.  Great place to do a Halloween haunted house.  We even check out some of the prisoners’ wall scratchings on display in one of the cells.   It’s kinda freaky getting in their heads, seeing these last-gasp scratchings in the same prisons that made the prisoners go psycho.  So we decide to bolt to the…

Rialto Bridge
The Rialto Bridge, built by a guy whose last name was Bridge
 
appropriately enough, stretches across the Grand Canal.  It’s packed with souvenir shops on top and gondolas and vaporettos  (water buses) sailing below.

Galleria Accademia
We get cultured at the Accademia, featuring paintings by Bernini, Titian and several other artists I’d remember the names of if I had taken an art history class.  Jen and I bum a tour off of an English-speaking tour guide and her group by pretending to be Japanese tourists who very coincidentally seem to be follow the tour group from room to every room.

Church of Santa Maria de la Salute
We take a break on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria.  If anyone has been to my office in the past 5 years, this is the church that’s been hanging in the photo on my wall.

Murano
We catch a water boat to Murano, glass capital of the world.  We catch a glass blowing demonstration – it’s amazing to see the guy turn a lump of hot glass into a horse in less than 2 minutes in front of us.   Unfortunately, the glass -  vases, clocks, and even Pokemon figurines - is twice as expensive as back in the shops around San Marco Square. 

FOOD:  Gelato in Venice is awesome, and available every block.  Kev tries to eat gelato twice a day.  Jen loves the lasagna.

Nightlife: Concert
As if the art and architecture weren’t enough, we ooze even more culture at night by hitting a Vivaldi Four Seasons concert (€21 just €15 cause the ticket lady thinks we’re students!).  During the concert, I realize that this is the same concert hall my bros and I were on our last trip to last trip to Venice three years ago.  In fact, I recognize the other ticket girl Claudia, so we take a photo.  It turns out Claudia’s boyfriend is the cello player, which is why she’s been working there the past six years actually.  Cool.  Jen totally loves the concert – it hits the spot (especially cause it gives us a rest after 10 hours of running around Venice!)

Next stop: Florence

Canals wind thru Venice.  

Jen’s Diary______________
It’s totally like Disneyland here.  It’s packed with tourists.  The locals who work here leave at night.  Everything’s a little expensive.  It’s just like Disneyland.
Jen is totally amazed at the laundry hanging in the alleys.  We check it out to see how it works.  The clotheslines are on pulleys on each end so the locals can hang their laundry in the streets (which we would call alleys).  Jen says it’d be a bit funny to have your undies fluttering in the wind for all the tourists to take photos of.  So of course, we take this photo outside our second hotel.

Venice streets are not to be underestimated.  It takes us an hour searching the streets to find our second hotel.  And it is no fun to lug luggage through Venice streets for an hour.  We even start to allocate about 15 minutes of “lost time” whenever we return to our hotel.

Venice street performer wearing the masks worn during Venice's crazy Caranval in the spring.

Bridge of Sighs 

Kev goes psycho in one of the Doge Palace prisons

We try lunch at a neighborhood restaurant near our hotel.  We know the place is authentic when we see three gondoliers stroll in on their lunch break.  Jen says her lasagna is amazing, and my pasta’s delicious.  Real Italian food is not dripping in fatty cream sauces like the Americanized versions we get.  And I have to practice the Italian style of eating s..l..o..w..l..y.  I’m a slow eater in the U.S., but a fast eater in Italy so I practice eating slow….I try to get down to about 5 chews per minute.  We try to clock 2 hours per meal.  And I try to take  40 minutes to drink a cup of coffee.  Many cafes don’t even serve coffee to go.  Instead, you have to drink it at the counter out of the cup and saucer.

Murano glass blower.  After looking at several shops, Jen and I can’t find stuff we couldn’t get back in the States.  And there’s a fine line between glitzy glass and gaudy glass which we just don’t want to cross.  Maybe we hit the most touristy of Murano’s five islands, but beware the high prices if you go!

Kev and concert ticket taker Claudia I recognize from 3 years ago