Day Something-or-Other, Or We Finally Made it to Venice

So, it's day...8? 9? I honestly don't remember. I'm having a hard time remembering what day of the week it is, much less how long we've been here. I suppose from a vacation standpoint, that's a good thing.

So we started off in Florence today - our plan was to visit the Science Museum that was inexplicably closed on Saturday. Of course, today is Sunday, and the Science Museum is, naturally, always closed on Sundays. So, we just walked around Florence a bit then left for the train station.

We had an uneventful trip to Venice. I will say that train travel is really nice - a three hour train ride is MUCH more bearable than a three hour flight. I think it's partly the extra space and partly that, all things considered, trains are pretty quiet. At any rate, we made it to Venice about 2:30 this afternoon.

So far, it seems like each area we visit is more and more crowded, and at first Venice seemed to maintain this trend. We figured out (sort of) the vaporetti system (sort of like boat buses), and made it over to the center of Venice. We finally found our hotel, a pretty nice little 6-room house in the heart of the city. We have a pretty nice room, a much softer bed, and overall pretty decent accommodations. They advertise a broadband internet connection, and I can detect a couple of wireless networks, but I can't connect to any of them. We'll have to ask in the morning, so it'll be another day sans pictures. Hopefully more tomorrow.

We went and got our bearings around Venice this evening. Once you get away from the main tourist thoroughfares, some parts of the city are nearly deserted, and it's quite peaceful. There are canals everywhere, and occasionally you run into dead ends where there is no bridge. Venice practically requires a map, and luckily Jill got us set up ahead of time.

The idea of a city on the water is odd, but in practice it's pretty cool. There are plenty of normal streets and "vias" in Venice, although there are no cars and most of the streets feel more like alleys. The buildings are all multi-story, so walking down a street feels like walking down a canyon at times. There are plenty of places where you'll suddenly walk out onto a little bridge over one of the canals, and you can get a view down across the water. It's quite pretty.

There are a lot of touristy sights here that we'll try to see - St. Mark's Basilica, the Doge's palace (which sounds pretty interesting), the Peggy Guggenheim art collection, and the island of Murano where Venice's glass industry resides. I'm guessing we'll also take time to just stroll around Venice and take it easy our last two full days in Italy (Wednesday doesn't count, we'll be on a train to Rome half the day). We'll work on those pictures in the meantime.