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Saturday December 1st, 2012: Venice, Italy
Bob: We didn't arrive in Venice until noon, so for once we could take pictures of St. Mark's Square and the Doge's Palace during the daytime as our ship passed by to its mooring place. The air was clear, so we could clearly see the snow-capped Alps looming up in the distance, as well as the surreal water-based city below. Although I had read of "aqua alta" or high water in Venice, I was surprised to see St. Mark's square flooded at high tide. We could even clearly see people using the temporary elevated walkways that are deployed in some areas during these temporary floods. |
Monika: We had a last breakfast with Jim and Susan and then went back to our room to pack. We were going to dock in Venice around noon and wanted to be all packed so we could enjoy the afternoon with Jim and Susan wandering around Venice. It was nice steaming into Venice while it was light and sunny. It seemed like the snowy alps where floating in the sky behind the city. We saw where they were building the new seawall to hopefully avoid flooding like they had the last couple of weeks. Actually the area around the lion leading up to St. Marks Square seemed to be still somewhat wet. It is nice to have a balcony from where we could take all the pictures of our entry into the city. |
Bob: We had arranged with Jim and Susan to walk into Venice together, so we disembarked shortly after noon and started wending our way through the labyrinth of alleys and canals that serve as the "streets" of Venice. Until you have tried to find your way in Venice, you don't realize how confusing such a maze of small, ancient, and often dead-end paths can be! I had charged up my GPS the night before, it really did help keep us on track and recover from getting lost a couple of times. |
Monika: Once we were docked, we met Jim and Susan and started off on our explorations. There was a new 'people mover' that connected the port area with the Piazzala Roma for only 1 Euro. It worked like a charm and would make getting to the train station tomorrow morning a lot easier. We walked up and down the street enjoying the charm of the town and, of course, taking pictures. None of us had lunch, so we stopped at a pizzaria. Bob and I shared a small ham and cheese pizza. Really good. |
Bob: We wandered slowly along the main tourist routes over to the Rialto Bridge, where we stopped to get some pictures. |
Monika: We finally made it to the Rialto bridge and there crossed the Grand Canal. |
Bob: While Monika and Susan were in shops, I also had time to take a nice sequence of pictures of some of the gondolas and gondoliers that were passing under the bridges. The high water was making their job quite a bit more difficult as they had less clearance under the low-lying bridges. I even saw one guy lie flat on his back to kind of hand-propel his gondola with passengers under one small bridge! We continued on to St. Mark's Plaza, where both St. Mark's Cathedral and the Doge's Palace are located. I watched our backpacks while Jim, Susan, and Monika went inside St. Mark's, but as it was cloudy the beautiful mosaics inside were hard to see. We split up at the Doge's Palace as Jim and Susan wanted to see that and we already had done so during Wanderung 10. |
Monika: Then it was on to St. Mark's Square. It was no longer under water, the tide had probably gone out. St. Mark's was open so we went inside. It was not nearly as impressive inside as I had remembered. Probably because it was a gloomy day and the golden ceiling had no sunlight to reflect it. At this point, we left Jim and Susan at the Doge's Palace that we had seen the last time we were in Venice. We had a rather tearful good bye, since the two had become really good friends. |
Bob: Instead, we set off on a Quest. Our Quest was to find both the Auberge Marin (English: Bed and Breakfast Marin) where we had stayed at our last visit, and the nearby small wine shop that sold bulk prosecco. As it turned out, we not only managed to find them both but also found the small Italian pizzeria (Trattore Pizzeria) where we had wonderful pizza dinners with Heinke, Gustl, Helga and Jim during Wanderung 10. Such wonderful memories of us all having pizzas there in the evenings! Night had fallen by that time and Venice looked astonishingly beautiful with the lights reflecting on the dark waters of the canals. |
Monika: Going back I had another mission. When we had stayed in Venice a couple of days, I had found a little store that sold bulk wine, i.e. you brought the container, they filled it with Red, Rose, White, or even Prosecco. So just in case we found it again, I had brought an empty 1.5l Coke bottle. I knew it was just around the corner from the Auberge Marin, where we had stayed on our second visit to Venice. But before we got there, we passed another place we remembered from our first visit to Venice with Heinke, Gustl, Helga, and Jim. This was a pizzeria that made by far the best pizza. Unfortunately, we had eaten already, so we just took some pictures and the forged on. |
Bob: The little hole-in-the-wall wine shop was called "Cantina da Fior" and since the proprietor's name was Fior Davide we gathered that the gent we met inside was indeed Davide himself. He cheerfully filled a Coke bottle with 1.5 liters of prosecco from his bulk container (Italian: "sfusi")for a total of only 4.5 Euro, a bargain at any price. He was pleased that we had found our way back as his shop is back off the Grand Canal on S. Croce 644 where very few tourists are likely to wander (but he has an email address: nicotony1941@libero.it ) . While it perhaps true that you can't go home again, sometimes you can re-visit the past and find that it hasn't really changed very much at all. I was very comforted that Auberge Marin, Trattore Pizzeria, and Cantina da Fior were all still operating in Venice. It was almost like coming home again and we decided that we wanted to come back to Venice again some day and stay a bit, and we promised Davide that we would once again patronize his shop when we did so. My left knee, however, was really starting to ache by then, so we headed back to the ship via the main train station and the new People Mover that runs from Piazza Roma to the ship terminal. I was amazed, however, to see that the big, brand-new bridge from Piazza Roma across to the train station did not have any kind of ramp to roll our luggage across; instead, we had to clamber up and down about 50 or so tiny steps! Nuts! But the People Mover worked just fine in getting us from Piazza Roma to the ship; we timed the trip back from the train station as 45 minutes or so total, and we used that estimate to plan our trip the next morning back to the train station. The People Mover also saved my knee a bit of walking, for which I was grateful. Even so I was dog-tired when we returned to the ship and had dinner--so tired, in fact, that a kept falling asleep while downloading and backing up all our pictures afterwards. Once that was done and the memory chips cleared, however, it was "lights out" for me! |
Monika: To my great surprise, we did find the little hotel we had stayed at, Auberge Marin, and from there we found the store and it was there and open. Well for 4.50 Euro he filled our 1.5l Coke bottle with Prosecco. Yeah, we were ready for our next cruise. Next we walked over to the train station to check out the trek we had to make the next morning. Unfortunately, the new bridge from the Piazzala Roma to the train station was very large but did have small steps. Couldn't they at least have put a small ramp at the side to pull wheelies????? Oh well, the people mover at least got us easily back to the ship. We had a last dinner and went to bed early. |
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