Venezia, Italia

Chris and I went on an Italian cruise last week! We started with a weekend in Venice. After finding cruising down the Grand Canal and finding our hotel, we started exploring. We came across a church having a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons that evening and bought tickets. The next church we saw hosted an exhibit of musical instruments from Vivaldi's time. Past all the music fun, we explored alleys on our way to St. Mark's Square, which is very impressive. We had a delicious Italian meal, and went back to the hotel to rest before the concert. Out and about again, we had pizza and watched the Vivaldi concert. It was amazing! The musicians were fantastic. The cellist had quite a bit of character, he was very entertaining to watch.

The next morning we started walking the opposite way and walked around to the Rialto bridge. We found lots of good Venetian souvenirs, such as leather goods, a silk tie for Chris, a Venetian mask for me, and a Murano glass wine stopper. We continued on to St. Mark's Square again and went in St. Mark's Basilica. It was breathtaking! The inside was covered in gold mosaics. I loved it. We decided to take a gondola ride and it was wonderful. It was relaxing and fun to see the city from a gondola. Chris loved being on the water. We had lunch at a restaurant on the bay and decided to make our way to the cruise ship. It's a good thing we didn't take the vaporetto to the port because we would have been on the opposite side of it as our boat! We walked along the bay toward a stop recommended by our hotel host, and it ended up that we were walking straight toward our boat! We could tell because ours was the only cruise ship with sails, the Wind Surf is the largest sailing vessel in the world.

We hopped on the boat and settled into our room, then we went exploring. We had a free acupuncture appointment at the spa (eek!) and Chris got poked with needles whereas I opted for pressure points instead. We had dinner, watched the boat sail out of Venice about 10:45, and passed out in bed.

Venice Sept 2009