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| This text mentions Chicago. Can a French-speaker tell us what it means? |
There are two ways to ascend the tower. You can take your babypurse out of your babydiaper and pay to take the babyelevator, or you can take your manwallet out of your manpants and manpay to take the manstairs. We climbed the stairs up to the "second floor", about 500 feet up, just as the sun set. Unfortunately, we couldn't go any higher via the stairs, so we decided to stop our ascent there.
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| At this point we were really only about 20 feet up. Also, this photo was NOT taken at the Mexico City olympics. |
We caught a beautiful view of every landmark we had toured over the previous four days, as well as many that we missed.
As a finale to our final night in the city, the thousands of strobes on the tower began flickering in an extraordinary light show... the "bling" the bum had mentoned to us two nights before.
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| Bettie... I think that tower is flashing us. |
Tuesday, we cleaned our apartment, did some laundry, did one last tour of the area, and headed to Charles de Gaulle.
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| Laundry never seemed like so much fun. |
The flight was mostly uneventful. There are no seating assignments on EasyJet, so it was confusing to see everyone line up for boarding an hour before takeoff. We landed in Venice at 8:30 pm, caught the Alilaguna water taxi to the island, and found our way along a frightening, narrow, seaside walkway to our new room.
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| B'Day, mate. |
Pietro, our host, gave us a map and showed us the locations of many fine restaurants and other locations around the city. We set out to find dinner. On our way, we encountered a befuddled old man who reminded us of Woody Allen. Weirdly enough, he was in fact a Bostonian who was teaching English in a prep school in Saudi Arabia. He had been wandering the alleys of Venice for hours, and we used our newfound map to help him find hs home. Then we found a place that was still serving food, ate, and then returned to our room to crash.
And Six- Bongiorno Venezia!
We began exploring Venice by finding a spot for Bettie to get her coffee fix. We then ventured to the Piazza del San Marco, in Napoleon's opinion Europes "finest drawing room" or something like that.
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| So many tourists. Stupid tourists. Especially those American ones. Why can't they.... oh. Wait... |
It was lovely, but also an explosion of tourists from all over the globe. Unfortunately, they were also doing renovations on each and every landmark, which definitely marred the scenery.
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| Ahhh the famous Grand Canal of Venice. Really makes you want to.... buy... a... Toyota.... |
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| So much scaffolding. |
Undeterred, we toured the Basilica San Marco, then headed over to the Rialto, one of three main bridges across the Grand Canal. Then we used a vaporetto, which is like a crossing guard for the grand canal, but its in a wobbly tiny boat. This cost us measly 50 cents, and nearly a dunk in the grand canal. Fun!
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| In |
We then wandered aimlessly, indulged in gelato, and finally gave in the to Venice map gods and desperately headed home.
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| Edward Gelatohands |
We had been conquered by the tiny alleys, weird street names, and impossible to maneuver passageways that make up Venice. Humbled, we made an offering to the Venetian map gods, and carefully treked to a dinner spot recommended by our host, Peitro. This was lovely, as it was close, served us a selection of traditional Venetian "cinchettie" or hordoerves of creamed cuttlefish, shrimp, anchovies, octopus, and something that probably was in the family of crawfish (likely a paleolithic trilobyte, according to the knowledge of Trevor).
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| What IS that thing? |
We were in heaven. Along with a bottle of prosecco and homemade real Italian pizza, this soothed our tired soles. We returned to our room, grabbed the laptop, bought a bottle of wine and wrote this blog entry. And then we returned to our room for sleep and ... oh god.... we're future-blogging.
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