Italy – Venice!

We arrived in Venice and waited for our water taxi to our next stop, keen to see what Venice was like. The taxi arrived and started its way to St Marks square. All I can is WOW, talk about crazy! You know how you see the shows on telly with the crazy bike riders in Thailand? Imagine that with boats and thats the waterways of the main island of Venice. It was MAD.

We got off the boat and straight onto a gondola for a very calm and cruisy trip around the canals. This was lovely, we even had a gondolier singing to us! After our cruise around the canals we headed onto another boat for Lido Island, this is a beach island resort and where our hotel would be for the next 2 days.

The next morning we took a motor scafi to Guidecca Island for some Murano glass blowing and to visit the factory. I seriously wanted to bring everything home with me! We then took a boat to the main island of Venice for some free time around the square. We had 2 hours to look around and have some lunch. (traditional pizza followed by gelati of course) oh and we got lost! Once we worked out how to get back to the boat to go back to Lido Island we had some free time there too to rest. Later that night we went to Burano Island to look at the bright homes and have dinner. They are brightly coloured because myth has it that when the fishermen went out to sea they could see which was their house from out there, also if the window was open their wives were faithful, if closed unfaithful! The real reason is each family has a different colour to identify themselves.

We had the HUGEST dinner on Burano consisting of Fish paste, bread, mozzarella and tomato, risotto, lasagne, fish and chips, fruit and peanut brittle, almond biscuits in Amaretto and coffee.

Woken the next morning by a 6.3 earthquake in Bologna. The hotel moved for quite a while, bit frightening but we were all safe.

The lovely Ronnie and Pete that we met on the bus and I am sure we will keep in contact with