Venice 2
Trip Start
Nov 14, 2008
1
51
102
Trip End
Feb 26, 2009
Venice,
Italy
Sunday, January 4, 2009
The gondolas are ridiculously expensive - at least 80 Euro per gondola for only a 45 minute ride. While the others slept off their nightclub experience (as per usual), I went on a vaporetto for 45 minutes along the Grand Canal. Though I still maintain that Venice is a shithole at night, during the day it's beautiful. I wanted to spend longer on the water, so took a trip out to the islands.
The islands - Murano and Burano
Murano is famous for its glass, and Nathan and Lauren recommended I check it out. The first thing I saw was a glass blowing demonstration - literally 2 minutes after taking the glass out of the furnace, after prodding and picking the glass, the guy had made a prancing horse! I bought quite a bit in the giftship for my family, before noticing the next shops had one of the same items for a quarter of the price! I spent about 1 1/2 hours on the island, incl. lunch, while looking unsuccessfully for miniature shoes to add to my grandmother's vast collection.
Burano is known for lace, but I wasn't interested in that. They have some incredible Venetian masks, I took plenty of photos, and I managed to find a nice glass miniature shoe. The other nice thing about Burano is its houses - each house is painted a different colour, so the streets along the canals look like a vibrant box of crayons.
The night
We went back to the same pizza place, where I naturally loaded my pizza with more parmesan cheese than toppings. We also went back to the same bar, run by a cool 20 year old Albanian called Fabio. He told us last night that tonight he'd have 40 easy American girls at 11pm, but when we showed up at 11 he said they left half an hour ago, and would be back tomorrow. I don't believe a word he says but the other guys were too excited by the prospect to think properly.
