Venice

Venice is an amazing and ridiculous city. You have to be a special kind of person to live in a place where everywhere you go, you walk or go by boat, and everything is brought in by boat. If you are sick or about to give birth, you need to walk to the one remaining hospital or get the ambulance boat.  If you are rich, you probably have your own boat to take you around, otherwise you get a water taxi or take the public transportation, which you guessed it, is a boat.  If you move houses, you load everything into a boat and you sail over to your new place.

The story that the city is sinking is true, people basically have abandoned the first floors of every building. It's also very expensive to live here, so many people are moving out. The population is down to 57,000 residents, half of what it was 20 years ago. The Islands are slowly becoming tourist and visitor accommodations and soon no one will really live in Venice.

We started our tour today at the Rialto Bridge, which is a grand piece of architecture, and the biggest and oldest bridge in Venice. From there we walked throughout the Rialto Market, with tonnes of fresh vegetables and fish. The Rialto is a very popular part of town, if you ever need to get there, you can follow the signs or the crowds. Maps are pretty useless in Venice as there are so many small streets, canals and bridges.

As you walk around you will see one beautiful building and square after another, including the home of Mark Polo, the Church of Miracles, Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice's last hospital, which looks like a church from the outside, and the Arch of Paradise.

We then took the requisite Gondola ride, which was part of our tour, but usually costs 80 euros for 30 minutes ($1 = 1.20 euros). If you choose to do this, I would recommend not doing it at Rialto, which is super crowded and a little boring until you get out on to the Grand Canal. There are berths all over town, so I doubt it would be hard to find a nicer spot to launch from. Today we learned that all the Gondolas are privately owned, and the operator has to train for quite a while before he can get a license.  Also, a Gondola can cost upwards of $50,000 to buy.

For lunch we stopped at St. Mark’s Square, where you can sit out in the square and have a nice meal, but it is expensive. If you sit in front of one of the bands, you'll pay a 6 euro cover charge and 20 euros each for a sandwich and a glass of wine. 

After lunch we toured around a couple of very popular tourist sites, Doge's Palace and St. Mark's Basilica. Once again I am super happy we had a guide as we bypassed the line and went straight in. She also offered a lot of interesting stories you might not have gotten by yourself. The Doge for those of you who do not know, was an elected official who oversaw the government, but was only a figure head like the Queen of England. If you wanted to meet with him, you sometimes had to wait weeks outside his office, but it is a pretty nice waiting room.

St. Mark's is still a working church with several services a day. It is worth the tour to see all the amazing tile that decorates the walls. Most of it is gold, so when they turn on the lights the ceiling gleams.