Day 7: Venice: Take 1

If I had to choose two words to describe Venice, they would be... Beautiful, and HOTTERTHANHADES! Yes, that is one word. Really though, besides the heat, Venice was everything I hoped it would be. Brig was a good sport to go there with me, because this type of site seeing isn't really his thing.
As stated in the last post, we arrived really late at night (or really early in the morning rather), and pretty much just found our B&B and crashed. Wednesday morning we slept in, had a nice breakfast, and made our way out into the madness!

This is the B&B we stayed in and it was fabulous! When I booked it, I was soooo nervous that it was going to be nothing like it looked like on the website. Booking a room for our time in Venice gave me more anxiety than anything else that we did the entire trip. I had no idea what things were like, what prices were reasonable, what the weather would be, where was safe, etc. And Candice wasn't going to be with us, what were we do to without her?! There were actual hotels to stay at, but they were UNBELIEVABLY expensive! I found a site that was linked to the airline we were using, and in browsing found this little B&B called "Dimora Marciana." It was non-smoking, had A/C, served breakfast, and was right near St. Marks square, which was really all we could ask for. And it was $150/night. I thought for a minute it was too good to be true. Most other placed I had looked at at that price were total dumps. I decided that I just had to take a blind leap of faith, cross my fingers, and hope Brig didn't want to kill me when we got there!
Luckily, it was wonderful! It didn't have a nice canal view or anything, but other than that, I would recommend it to anyone!

This is the tiny little street that the B&B was on. I will admit that when we walked down this the first time, I was very skeptical! But at the same time, it was beautiful to me.

This is just right outside St. Mark's square. We didn't ever take a gondola ride. Mostly because of the outrageous prices ($100 and then $50 more if you want them to sing!), but also because of the BLAZING heat! It was about 100 degrees, and since it is an island surrounded by water, it was SO humid! There were a couple of times throughout the days we were there that I thought I was going to die. Good thing the beauty of it all made up for it.

Minus the trees, this is exactly how I pictured Venice. All the little street vendors, selling paintings, drawings, and little souvenirs. I LOVE that about traveling places :)

Heading into St. Mark's square. Straight ahead is St. Mark's Cathedral, and on the right is the old Palace, where they now have a museum. We toured the insides of both of these places on Day 2, so be excited for that!

St. Mark's Cathedral. The painting and the incredible architecture were seriously unreal! So beautiful!

This is up on the Rialto Bridge. I was actually really amazed at how small the island is. It only took us about 15 minutes to walk from our B&B which was on the right side of the island by St. Mark's to the Rialto bridge, which is in the center of Venice. My sister had told me that it takes about 45 minutes to walk from one end to the other, but even then, I still wasn't expecting it.

Sooooo crowded! I was shocked at the difference between how quiet it was when we got there the night before, to how busy and loud it was the next morning.

This is what I picture when I picture Venice. I guess I was kind of dumb, but I totally thought this was pretty much all it was everywhere, and that you had to take boats to get anywhere. I was mistaken. There are a ton of little streets, and besides taking the water bus to and from the main station, we didn't have to take a boat anywhere.
I do love that picture though.

I really wanted a picture by one of these guys! We had to be kind of sneaky, haha.

There were little churches and cathedrals all over the place!

We literally walked around all day on the first day we were there. Just seeing the sites and taking everything in. Sweating our guts out. We really didn't do anything extra exciting, but it was so fun to actually be there. It's just one of those places that I never thought I would be able to go, I guess. When we got home, we watched Casino Royal, and it was pretty cool to see things in the movie that we had seen in real life. It was fun to say "we've been there!" We obviously don't travel a lot, haha.

Foot Locker, haha. On the street perpendicular to our B&B was a Gucci, and then near us was also a Prada, and all sorts of other high end stores. I'm not really into that kind of stuff, but it was pretty crazy to see all of that in such an old, historic place. I did enter a few of those stores a couple of times simply for the fact that they were the only ones with A/C. You couldn't help but be taken in by the deliciously cool air that ran by your ankles as you walked past.

I was just stunned by some of these buildings

This was an exhibit that they had going on while we were there. All over there were these murals that were made with painted eggs. Yes, all those tiny little dots are painted eggs. Very cool.


After walking what had to have been many miles, we decided that we just couldn't take the heat anymore. We barely made it back to our room, and pretty much just sat on the bed and let the cold air consume us. It was glorious.

After that, we headed out to eat!:

We were on a pretty tight budget this whole trip, so we found somewhere Italian, where there was A/C and we could sit down, but that wasn't going to break the bank (like most places). The food wasn't great, but we didn't really expect it to be for $20 a plate (crazy, I know, but we learned fast). The interesting thing was that this was the best service we had while we were in Italy, and our servers were all Asian and Middle Eastern. They were wonderful, and it was so nice to be able to actually talk to them without getting a rude look or just a total shaft. We didn't have great experiences with Italian service. I'm sure it's not like that everywhere, probably just bad luck I guess....?

After dinner we walked around again for a little bit so that we could see the beauty of Venice at night. And it was certainly beautiful!

Then back to our nice cozy room. Can you see why when I saw the pictures originally I thought it was too good to be true?! It looks amazing! And it was for the most part. Really the A/C was all that I cared about at this point. This picture was taken from the B&Bs website.

I did think that the glow of the chandalier was gorgeous against the wood beams. I loved it. Couldn't resist taking a pic.

Venice day 1 was a success. We knew we had a challenge ahead of us on day 2, because we were going to have to check out of our room early in the morning and carry our bags around with us all day, as we didn't fly out until very late at night. Don't worry, we packed VERY light.
A glorious sleep, and another amazing day ahead!