Venice - better than anyone ever described

We love Venice. It is a magical city. It is like an entire city is living on houseboats! We tried describing our houseboat community to some Italians and they just couldn't understand. For those of you who have never been here imagine a city made up of 117 islands all connected to each other by quaint bridges that all involve steps up, then over then back down. The steps provide the height over the water for boats. Boats are everywhere. Families are out in boats, DHL delivers packages in boats, ambulances are boats, basically everything that would be a car or truck is a boat. There are bus boats called vaporettos that cost 6 euros per ride (yes $8) that take you on the main water boulevards. There are taxis which apparently put the meter in to gear at 50 euros. Many of them are quite luxurious, with polished teak and fine leather seats. We took a budget buster ride in one yesterday and thought it was great fun.

Our hotel is virtually around the corner from the train station. It requires no bridges to get there and is only three flights upstairs. The wonderful receptionist, Claudio carried the bags for us, after apparently assessing our state of energy as exhausted. We had arrived in Venice from Verona at about noon. We walked from our Verona hotel to the train station which was a longer hike than we normally take with the bags. Then, when we got to Venice and hiked over the tall bridge on the Grand Canal, and over several streets to our hotel, we found that the hotel had a plumbing problem which required them to move us to the new place. All of that bragging about having a bathroom was for naught, as the new place only had a room with the bathroom across the hall. They provided us with a 10 Euro discount because of the lack of an en suite bathroom, so the room now hits our 100 Euro per night budget. We don't have to share the bathroom with anyone. In fact, we have an ancient skeleton key to open the door to our own private bathroom. So, we do have to dress to use it, but there is no old dude in his bathrobe coming out the door when we go in.

We probably haven't mentioned the noise you hear inside some of these hotels. I know we have mentioned the street noise which seems pretty common in most of the places we stay. We are in inner city hotels with tourist traffic out on the street, so there is almost always street noise. There is also sometimes the noise of other guests. We have overheard somethings we would prefer not to overhear- especially in the places where you eat breakfast with the other guests....always looking around at the other couples as they sip their coffee wondering who the moaning rabbits are. Last night it was snoring that woke us up and kept us awake. Thank heavens for the iTunes on my computer. We whipped that out at 2:00 in the morning and set it to play New Age meditative music all night. Far better to listen to moaning of your own choosing than snoring.

We are learning to do our errands in cities that are new to us. Early this morning while we were both mostly sleeping but sort of awake I glanced at my watch to see that it was 6:40. Ten or fifteen minutes later when Mike opened his eyes I asked him the time to find it was 7:40. My watch had stopped. We were standing at the jewelery store when it opened at 9:00 and by 9:10 my watch was working. Venice was another tough city to find a grocery store, but wandering around eventually led to one, and now we have replacement toothpaste. Dental floss is a tougher problem. Apparently they don't have Dr. Wendy, our family dentist for the past twenty years who would freak out if we tried the excuse that we couldn't find dental floss in Venice when it ran out. After traipsing through several farmacias, we finally found some. While we were backtracking from our original hotel to the one we ended up in we passed a laundramat which I went back to later to treat ourselves to soft, dry clothes that don't smell like hotel shampoo. We use the hotel shamposs for laundry soap and when the clothes have hung for a day, we put the stiff, sometimes damp clothes on and wear them again. Some of our errands are less critical than running out of dental floss or toothpaste. Like finding pretzels. Mike really misses his pretzels and they just don't sell them anywhere in Italy. In fact, it is hard to find the bags of nuts and raisins we ate on trains when we were in Spain and Portugal. In Italy, the only nuts we see are in their shells in bags at the open air markets. Not conducive to snacking tourists. The open air market did provide us with our lunch today, though... bananas and grapes. The big purple grapes are huge, with seeds that crunch when you chew them down.

Take care- I'm off to wander Venice some more. I tried to find the Jewish quarter today which is somewhat near our hotel. It is the site of the original ghetto, and the word "ghetto". There are several synagogues there dating four hundred years back. Instead I ended up with lots of wonderful dead ends, each one a reminder that when you are retired you are never late no matter where you are going. I am sitting in an Internet cafe at the Piazza San Marco which is about as far from our hotel as you can walk without doubling back, so I have at least another hour to get back to the hotel. So, I'm off.

Love, Deanne