Venice Day 1

As usual I was woken up by the sun streaming through our paper thin curtains and tried my hardest to put some washing on but the machine only made terrible noises. I thought about trying to work out what was wrong myself but thought against it seeing as I wouldn't know what I was looking at anyways. I would wait until my engineer woke up! Our plans were to just get lost in the heart of Venice with no map, sounds romantic right? Our host Marco had left us breakfast which seems to be what the Italians like since we got the same thing yesterday at Alessandro's. It is pretty much store bought completely dry bread in which you add your jam on top. It seems they do this instead of a toaster! He also gave us some oat biscuits which I was stoked that I could eat :). When Lew woke up I tasked him with dealing to the washing machine. Later I walked in on him and he had discovered that the water pipe it is attached to was only trickling water. Instead he decided to attach it to the tap on the bathroom sink with my medical tape which seemed to work ok and only dripped a little amount of water. Leaving this running and crossing our fingers we weren't going to come home to water flowing down the steps to meet us, we headed out into Venice. Marco had said we could bring our washing to his place or he would pay for us to use a laundry service but I sent him pictures of our makeshift option and he seemed to be ok with that. Neither of us did any navigating as we wandered the streets around San Polo and making our way to San Marco, running into many dead ends along the way. We managed to walk by Venice's University and not far after this we were stopped dead in our tracks at the window display of a shop called Danghyra. They had the most incredible kitchen/living room items we had ever seen and were more like artwork than your usual salad bowl. They had white plates with 24 carat gold painted on the inside, they had platters that nestled amongst each other in a wave like patter in grey and bronze. We were instantly sold and knew we needed one for our future house. We looked around inside briefly trying to narrow it down but really couldn't so we grabbed a business card and said we would come back later. We spent the entire day trying to figure out what colour scheme would work best in our future house that we didn't even know what it would look like!

After leaving that area and walking across many many bridges (did you know there are 400 in Venice?!) and found ourselves in the middle of St Marks Square looking straight at St. Mark's Basilica and flanked either side by the Procuratie and Ala Napoleonic which house the Museo Civico Correr, Museo del Risorgimento, and the Museo Archeologico. Also in the area there is the Dodges Palace which are considered Venice's most iconic buildings. We also saw the Campanile but decided against paying €8 ($13.60 NZD) to go up and get a view over Venice as the line was rather long - no where near the line at the Vatican trying to get into St Peters but still just too long. Building of the Campanile begun in the 10th century and was completed in the 12th, but its pointed roof was not added until the 15th century. Unfortunately in 1902 it collapsed, luckily with no casualties but took 10 years to rebuild it to its original height to 98.6 meters high. It is so tall that it was used as a beacon to guide ships home. To knock a few more sights off we also saw the Torre dell'Orologio (Clock Tower) built in 1496-1499 in a style typical of Venetian Renaissance architecture. We walked along the waterfront admiring how the sea opens up in this area and directly in front of the path are many gondoliers lined up. We arn't actually sure whether we want to spend a whopping €80 ($136 NZD) on a half hour gondolier ride and I said to Lew I would honestly prefer one of those plates/bowls from Danghyra (the shop we found earlier)! We both agreed that perhaps one day if we come back we will spend the money on one and after all we did get to be in a boat on the grand canal yesterday when we arrived and took the water bus, does that count? We ticked that area off our list pretty quick as despite being rather picturesque there were a lot of selfie stick welding tourists and we prefer to do Venice off the beaten track. We wanted to make homemade fish and chips for dinner and Marco had told us that the Rialto market isnt far away from our place. Despite being about a 20 minutes walk back to the area due to all the weaving in small lanes and over bridges we made it 20 minutes before the market closed. It was rather substantial but we couldn't spend to long admiring it as the fishmongers were beginning to pack away their catch. There was mainly whole fish and perhaps they would fillet them for you but we couldn't speak enough Italian to ask and chose the cheapest fish fillets there was on display. Once again having no idea what it was we pointed and they packaged it up for us! It was a reasonable size to feed the both of us and cost us €7 ($11.70 NZD) as it was €14 per kg ($23.60 NZD) which is actually an expensive fish! Normally at home I could just but Hoki for $10-12/kg. We decided we would come back tomorrow and pick up fresh ingredients for burger night tomorrow as we could see some nice meat patties in the shop windows of a few butchers. Since we were so close to the apartment and I didn't want to be carrying fish around all day we decided to drop it off and also check on the washing machine! As we arrived and went up the three flights of  stairs I was pleased there was no water coming out to greet us, and very happy when we opened the bathroom door and found it was finished! There was still a lot of darks I needed to do and seeing as we were hanging around for a little I started that also. The machine made that awful noise again like it cant suck enough water so we turned the tap up. It was lunchtime and we were both starving and since a lot of the shops close down between 12-2 we figured there was no harm in having a wee break. Lew had found a pizza place around the corner which we walked to leaving the washing machine to do its thing. We were gone literally 15 minutes to get some takeaway pizza and came back to find the bathroom flooded. We turned the tap off and I closed the door and said we should just eat the pizza and worry about that later. We demolished yet another lot of pizza and I must say we are becoming very attuned to what we would describe a good pizza is. This one we would rate as our worse so far in Italy despite being much much better than anything you would get back home haha! We also watched a video on Venice as we weren't sure what to see this afternoon. Then after all that we took out shoes and socks off and both waded into the water in the bathroom to try and mop it up. I turned the central heating on in the hope that it might help dry things out a little.

This afternoons plan was to find our way to the to Jewish Quarter other wise known as the Venetian Ghetto which is in the area of Cannaregio. The Jews in Venice were forced to live in a segregated area of the city from March 1516 - 1797 and it is the oldest Jewish ghetto in the world. The place wasnt really much to see but it was like its own little island with bridges entering it from either side. It was made up of a small square and the buildings were a lot higher than anything else we had seen in Venice so far since they had to cram a lot of people into a small place. You can visit the Jewish Museum of Venice here which is something we chose not to do this time. Probably one of the more spooky things was that there were metal plaques on the wall with depictions of scenes from concentration camps and a sentence remembering the Jews who were removed from the Jewish gehtto and transfered to these concentration camps on two seperate occasions. After this we weaved our way around more narrow streets feeling the warmth of the sun as it found its way throuh the buildings occasionally - It sure wasnt warm and Lew and I were both wrapped up in our down jackets but I think it is still a beautiful time of year to visit as I would imagine there is a lot less tourists and the colour of the trees are quite spectacular. We managed to find our way back to the train station where we entered last night and assessed the potential route we would need to take to avoid paying the €15 ($25 NZD) to take the boat out in a couple of days. It really was not possible with sooo many bridges and I think it would just cause more arguments than needed. Down the river from the train station there is one modern bridge that connects Venice's train station Santa Lucia to the piazzale Roma where all the buses come into Venice. It is called Ponte della Costituzione which was opened in 2008 and is one of the 4 bridged spanning the Grand Canal. It has an interesting appearance and is mainly made with steel and glass making it feel weirdly squishy as you walk over it. The sun was getting lower in the sky and we were taking some photographs looking back at the bridge of Scalzi just outside the train station. A young couple interrupted our photograph session to ask whether I could take a photo of them in the same spot haha! They handed me their old Canon camera and I was trying to get the background into the shot as well but kept asking them whether their camera was zoomed in as it was terrible. Lew took over automatically removing their lens and add in his big wide angle one instead. He flipped it to manual mode, fiddle with some buttons and began shooting what I can imagine will be a stand out photograph on their camera! The man of many talents this guy is and I really need to take the effort to learn how to use his camera properly without using automatic mode also. At the moment I just hand it to him to get the settings correct and then go about taking my photos! Carrying on down the river we stood on the bridge we had just photographed admiring the many types of boats using the Grand Canal - the most impressive being an ambulance which doesn't have to adhere to the 7km/hr rule like all the other boats, did you know that the police actually have speed traps set up where they can ticket you if your going over the speed limit?! It is pretty incredible the way the buildings sit on the side of the canal also and you can see where the water fluctuates as there is moss a lot higher than where the current water level sits. Venice is actually made up of 118 small islands but instead of choosing to build on those islands the buildings sit instead on wooden piles with wooden platforms on top and then the stone of the buildings. Venice only became inhabited as the Western Roman Empire fell in 5th Century AD and barbarians from the North begun raiding Romes former territories. People fled up to Venice which was just marshlands and initially settled temporarily but obviously became permanent! There is a particular book written in the 17th Century that outlines the construction processes in Venice and one example in particular being the Santa Maria Della Salute church completed in 1687. It took two years and two months to drive 1,106,657 wooden stakes, 4 meters in length into the water and sand below! Perhaps this is why the Venesians made the move permanent since they went to so much effort to construct their town. Lew was possibly going to get an ice cream from the Magnum store which are handmade and you choose the toppings extra yourself but they cost a exuberant amount of €5 ($8.40 NZD) and he exclaimed he could get an entire packet of them from the supermarket for that! We headed back home in the general direction and the discussion as to which piece of art we were going to choose from the shop we visited this morning came up again. Without me realising Lew had actually led us back to the shop instead of our apartment and once again we stood at the window trying to figure out what we wanted. The guy recognised us and told us to come into the warm and I told him we had been trying to figure this out all day. We put our bags in the corner of the room so we went like bulls in a china shop as we set about assessing each potential option. Lew pointed out a large grey bowl with a bronze inside and we picked this up having a conversation about the fact that it would match the interior of our future house if it was light or dark. Luckily there was the smaller version of this colour as well and the man explained that it had just been taking out of the kiln yesterday. There were 4 bowls that nestled into each other and the price steadily increased as they got larger. If we wanted all 4 it would cost us €110 ($185 NZD) and we decided that would probably be a little out of our price range since we were still unemployed and we dont even have a house of our own! We opted for the version with 3 instead which was only €71 ($120 NZD) and between us for a piece of art we thought that was not too bad. I did say to Lew that we would have to stay together now since it would be much to difficult to split a piece of art with 3 sections! I guess thats a commitment right?! We left the shop feeling very excited to one day have this on display in our stunning house. Dreams are free haha. Making our way back to the apartment the sun had set and I cooked a lemon loaf whilst we waited for it to be a more appropriate time to eat dinner. We had fish & chips for dinner with a side of salad and were so full we didn't even feel like going down to the gelato shop below our apartment. We watched some tv and relaxed for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow we shall check out some other islands - Murano, Burano and also the cemetery island!