9/17/07
Since the train to Venice leaves from Monselice (or nearest “real” town) once per hour, we got up fairly early and were at the station at 9am. The train takes 20 minutes to Padova and one hour to reach Venice. Once in Venice we walked out of the station and bought tickets for the vaporetto. 13 euro for a twelve hour ticket. We took the short way (out into the lagoon) to Piazza San Marco, where we started an iPod tour in front of the equestrian statue of good ole Vittorio Emanuele II. We walked past the Bridge of Sighs (and every time he said Bridge of Sighs the cheesy narrator had to sigh dramatically)
and then towards the columns marking the official entrance to the city. 
The Piazza was absolutely packed with people. And pigeons. It was a zoo, the worst I’ve seen in Italy. 
And long lines to get into everything. We listened to the iPods and looked at the outside of the Doge’s Palace,
St. Mark’s, 
the bell tower (that fell down in the early 1900s and was rebuilt) and the piazza. And the pigeons. And the people. And the people feeding the pigeons. Yuck! Then we started to walk to the Rialto Bridge and it started to sprinkle. Then thunder. Then rain. Really hard. We took refuge in a shop selling glass and stood there for a ½ hour watching the street turn into a river. Finally it lightened up and Sue found a restaurant right around the corner for lunch. I had pasta e fagioli soup. It was good, but holy cow our lunch was expensive. We ordered fairly light and the total for the four of us came to 104 euros. I’m glad I decided not to stay in Venice for the week!
After lunch we finally made our way to the Rialto, which was also mobbed with tourists, including two girls from Cal Poly (we saw their sweatshirts and asked if they were really from SLO). After a few pictures from the bridge we just started wandering the streets.
We eventually got back on a vaporetto to take us back to the train station, where we got on another vaporetto to go to Murano, the island where all the glass makers are. 
They were basically exiled there many moons ago when people were afraid they’d burn the city down with their furnaces. We never did get to see anyone blowing glass, but we went into lots of shops. Some pretty stuff, but a lot of repetition. After about two hours on Murano we took the vaporetto back to the train station and then the train back to Monselice. We stopped at our local pizza place for dinner before going home. We’re torn on whether we’ll go back to Venice…I don’t think anyone expected it to be that crowded.
