Venice: City on water - part 3

We visited some of the famous Murano Glass factories in Venice on the third day. These factories were specialized in fancy glass-wares for centuries in Europe.









Murano’s glass-makers led Europe for centuries, developing or refining many technologies including crystalline glass, enamel glass, glass with threads of gold, multicolored glass, milk glass, and imitation gemstones made of glass.













Most of these beautiful Murano glass pieces are very expensive and fragile so bringing them home is not very practical. And we still had a few destinations to go before coming home so we didn't buy any. This decision has brought a lot of regret later. 





There's another fine art one could find almost everywhere in Venice is Mask. These Venetian Mask are very well known and very well liked in the world.

 
They are super fancy and gorgeous. Every one of them is made in a unique way, and none is like the others. Many of them are sold in the hundreds and quite a few are running in the high thousands of dollars.





We stumbled onto a mass-production mask shop sold for a portion of the price that other shops had asked for. They didn't look very bad but they were not very well detailed.

Guess what, these were the Chinese-made masks that were brought here to fool those cheap-spending tourists.

Today, the artisans of Murano are still employing these centuries-old techniques, crafting everything from contemporary art glass and glass figurines to Murano glass chandeliers and wine stoppers, as well as tourist souvenirs.





There were a few high end shops here and there selling the costume we had seen in movies. They are worn during their annual carnivals of  mask and costume. I saw some costumes with the price tags in ten of thousands Euros.

We spent at least 10 hours of walking a day. There was no other way but walk and Venice is not small. We had the Venice map with all of its attractions and there's only one way to do it is to divide the city into horizontal grids. By the time we got back to our hotel every evening, we had piled up to 15 miles or more easily. This kind of tourist is not for people with walking challenge. 

Venice: City on water - part 2

First thing first, we had to find our hotel to check in our luggage and to refresh a little before we start on exploring the city. This task wasn't as simple as we had planned. The city is completely surrounded by water, bridges and waterways so the only transportation available is walking. The streets are so confused because the waterways zigzagging thru them. If finding an address in the middle of Hanoi is tough then finding a hotel here is ten-time tougher. It took us thru a bunch of very narrow alleys to reach our hotel. And it was so hard to look all the way up to find the tiny signage bearing the hotel name.



Our hotel was behind Hotel Violino D'oro in the picture and to get to it we had to squeeze thru a narrow alley between Hotel Violino and the tan and white building on the right. There wasn't any sign to point the way, and neither there's a lobby nor signage to tell if it's a hotel when you stand right in front of it. The entrance of this hotel is its restaurant. You have to go thru this restaurant to reach the front desk ... :-).


I booked the lowest price room I could find for the two of us and had not anticipated the room this teeny tiny. There's no space left for any amenities. The double bed took up ninety percents of the total space. There's a tiny dinning table with 2 little chairs pushing against the wall between the bathroom's door and the foot of the bed. You can't open the bathroom's door if there is a person sits at the dining table. I couldn't imagine the 2 average American would fit into this room. Oh well, we just needed some place to crash for 3 night stay.


The Grand Canal is the biggest waterway that snakes thru the city's of Venice in a large S shape, traveling from the Saint Mark Basin on one end to a lagoon near the Santa Lucia rail station on the other. On both side of the canal are buildings. Some of them are so old, and could have been built in the Medieval time.







There are several bridges built across it thru-out the city. There were all kind of water transportation from the large cruise ships, and commercial water buses (vaporetto), to private boats and water taxis, with the most famous and romantic of all, the gondolas.









Foot traffic gathers around three famous bridges that cross the canal: the Rialto Bridge, the Ponte Degli Scalzi, and the Ponte dell'Accademia.
Churches are many as well. Some were built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.











But the majority of the buildings here seem to be designed and build in the Renaissance and Classical styles of the sixteenth century.

We found a very nice market with fresh catch from the sea and very fresh produce brought over from shore, but they were a bit pricy. Everything is pretty expensive here anyways.
I forgot to mention that the tiny hidden room we stayed in Venice cost us one hundred sixty dollars a night ... :-(, and that's the cheapest that I found during the highest summer season.

Fresh fish and crustaceans caught and sold within a few hours in the morning everyday.

Fresh produce brought over from shore a couple hours away.

Tiny waterway with private boat docks are all over the city.

On the second day, we were happy to find a Chinese restaurant in Venice. It's the larger one of the two here that I had heard. A simple meal for 2 set us back sixty dollars.
We had to bite the bullets to dine here because we hadn't had any rice for almost a month here in Western Europe.

Merely a hundred feet to our hotel is the beautiful Santa Maria di Nazareth Church (known today as Scalzi).

The gondola ride is the same with a share taxi. You would find strangers who wants to share with you for the agreeable length of time from 20 minutes to 3 hours. It cost roughly about 90 dollars for a 20 minute ride. If you can find 3-4 people to share with you then you divide the sum to each rider accordingly. The same with 2-3 hour ride. It would cost a few hundred bucks among 5-6 riders. If you can't find any "friends", or you want yours to be a private party, then you have to foot the bills all alone.

Venice: City on water - part1

We left Vatican City early the next morning, hopped on a short flight straight to Venice. It's a bit over an hour flying, but getting in and out of the airports takes more time than that ... oh, well.

We landed at Marco Polo airport before 8 o'clock in the morning. It was good because there wasn't much activity there yet.

After running around to see if we had more than one options on getting to Venice and finding there was none, we were heading straight to the boat dock which is a short walking distance away.

There are many options on how to get to Venice from here, all by boats of course.

For the rich and famous, they have their own yacht waiting for them there.

For the rich and not so famous, they can rent a beautiful and luxury yacht with its own crew for themselves. It's pretty expensive ... upward to a grand.

Then there are taxi boat, the smaller version but you can get a pilot, a bottle of champagne and a small speedy boat for yourselves, and it's still quite expensive ... upward to a couple hundred bucks.

Finally, there is a public version of the bus on water ... It costs less than twenty Euros for one ticket. These vessels are designed not for speed nor sea worthy but for ... public transportation.

They are super slow and they stop so often just like buses to pick up and drop off their passengers. It takes more than two hours to get to Venice by this.

A nice Taxi boat anchored at its dock.

Another fancy Taxi boat anchored nearby.

 One of the Taxi boat to get you in and out Venice for around 200 bucks one way. It does come with a pilot and a bottle of champagne :-). This one will take a mere 30-35 minutes from shore to Venice and vice versa.

This is a form of public bus on water in the background. It's a lot cheaper but crowded and slow. It takes more than 2 hours to get there and another 2 hours to get back for around 20 bucks one way.






From a short distance, Venice is a complete city built right on top of the water. It is located in the marshy Venetian Lagoon which stretches along the shoreline, between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers. The sea that Venice was built on top called Adriatic sea, and it is a part of the Mediterrenean Sea.

It was very hot and humid when we got here in late July, but the ocean breeze helped quite a bit. There were not a lot of tourists landing at the dock around this early time yet but around noon and then on, they came in wave, hundreds and hundreds arrived in every 15-20 minute interval.

They dropped us off at Piazza San Marco or St. Mark's Square, the biggest gathering place of this city. The first thing we saw, was the great Clock Tower and the beautiful St. Mark Basilica. The sad part was we couldn't see much of this basilica due to its restoration. It was built 5-6 hundreds years ago and always in need of repair and maintenance. 

St. Mark's Square viewed from the boat dock.

St. Mark's Square viewed from one of many inlets. Restaurants have outdoor dining tables and chairs set up right in the middle of the square. The prices between non-seating and outdoor seating are quite different. It costs double if you wanna sit out there enjoy the views. The foods here are pretty expensive to any standard.

This is one of the many beautiful artworks surrounding the basilica.

St. Mark's statue standing on top of one of the entrances.

One of the beautiful painting of Mary and Child.

The main entrance of the basilica was in repair and blocked out to the public.

A trip to Western Europe: Vatican: St. Peter Square

We got to St. Peter Square around noon. The scorching sun couldn't stop us and many tourists from all over the world. The view of this square is breath taking, and for some unknown reason, my heart was pounding in my chest.
There was a bit of construction-maintenance going on as you can see in some of the pictures taken here.
I am a Catholic so this is the chance of a lifetime that I have to get it all in. Before getting inside I was wondering that would there be another chance before I die!

Couldn't wait to get inside ...
The persons we saw first were these two guards with funny clothing, but their faces were as serious and menace as the Secret Service of America. They gave no acknowledgement that you or anybody else were there. Everything else around them were nonexistent. 
We didn't need to move. The crowd was moving in in one direction. I couldn't stop it.

Saint Peter Basilica is one of the holiest basilicas in the Catholic faith. It's so humongous with rows and rows of statues, paintings, ornaments, and sculptures that have been collected in the last two millenniums. It also is one of the biggest Basilicas we have seen.
It contains some of the most famous paintings and sculptures known to mankind.

It would be a huge blunder if not counting the famous Michelangelo Pietà among these sculptures.

St. Peter Basilica's sheer dimensions are staggering: 614 feet long, 145 feet high in the aisle soaring to 385 feet inside Michelangelo's dome which is itself 137 feet across.
I was completely loss track of time when I was in there.

On the way out ... looking back.

A trip to Western Europe: Rome, part2

There are 2 places we have to visit no matter what: Vatican and the famous Coliseum.
We left our hotel early in the morning right after breakfast. It was a mere a half an hour drive when we reached the famous Colosseum. It was already crowded with thousands of tourists line up waiting for admission tickets. Lucky enough for us as a guided tour, we passed the gate without waiting.

Once I got thru the gates. The atmosphere, the feeling, and the imagination of the 2000 plus years past, and with the destruction of father time in full view, made my hairs standing on their ends. The feeling is very hard to explain knowing the unknown facts that happened here a couple thousands years ago. It was an unexplained sensational feeling.One can't dismiss the influence of Hollywood toward this history, but have to admit that there must have been some truth with it. Some where, some how in my head, there were the chants of a raucous crowd wanting the winner to execute the looser. I heard the maddening cheers of the observers, the silent cries from the friends of the fallen gladiators. For no reason, I really wanted to leave but something was pulling me back.
The actual Coliseum isn't that big like those in the movies, specially the one in the really old movie Ben Hur I had watched when I was 9 or 10 years old. It probably could house 3-4 thousands spectators or a bit more but couldn't hold more than 6-7 thousands in those movies.
There were 3 stories with the bottom one used to house the gladiators. We still can see the form of their living quarters, training facilities, and their weapon racks. The sewage pipes are still visible even though they are filled with dirt and weeds. It must have been extremely hot and terrible condition to live in knowing one's life were measure by his brute strength and fighting techniques.

Surround the Coliseum are the ruins of once the peak of the Roman empire buildings. Piling up here and there some large piles of red brick and dirt, the direct result destruction of time but the Roman letters and images carved and etched on stones are still visible clearly.
There is a huge gate with nothing left standing but a row of stone column. They are the witness of once seemed to be the largest, strongest and indestructible army of that era stretching out over 3 continents.

After leaving the Coliseum, we were heading toward the Vatican (known for its long waiting line) around noon when the crowd was in its lightest. We had our lunch inside the walls.
There weren't much in the cafeterias. Once again, we found their lunch consisted of large pieces of bread with not much of anything else. They contained very little sauce, cheese or meat, nothing but high amount of carbohydrates.