Venice

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Venice was amazing, and I could write several blogs on our trip. I've been thinking about what I would want to say about it. For one it was a beautiful city, even though I'm not one for a lot of water, it was beautiful walking along the canals or standing on the Rialto bridge looking over the Grand Canal with the buildings lined up on either side, right next to the water. We kept thinking that it really does look like all the pictures we had seen. We couldn't believe it was really that pretty. There were no cars but watching the boats negotiate though the canals was a different form of rush hour. They have every function of another city but in the form of a boat; garbage, mail, personal boats, buses, taxi's, delivery, we even saw a boat that had frozen fruit or something to that effect that you could buy from it.
One of the things I didn't so much enjoy was the amount of people. Moving around was tough enough but having to have to navigate with our luggage was another story entirely. The only time we didn't encounter enough people to feel as if we would get run over was in the morning before 9 or 10 when the shops opened. At that point it was mostly locals on their way to work. And walking through rush hour n Venice can be just as hectic and terrifying as driving a car in any other city. It was the sheer amount of people though that really clued me into why the locals don't exactly the like tourists even if they are why the economy is thriving. With the amount of tourists to Venetians is about 400 to 1. The two place where that could be seen the most was the market place by the Rialto bridge and St. Mark's square.
St. Mark's square was really cool. The church was beautiful full of mosaics and various other decorations that would take forever to describe and unfortunately no pictures are allowed inside. Since we didn't wait in the line outside that would have taken hours because we were with a tour group we got the abbreviated version and only walked around the ground floor. We did however walk past where St. Mark's (or Mark, of the gospel of Mark, for those of us who aren't catholic) remains apparently rest. Adjacent to the church was the Doge's palace, basically the government building. One one side there was the prison, connecting the two was a bridge, famously known as the bridge of sighs because prisoners crossed it just before they were taken to be executed. On the other side is two pillars that are known as the entrance to the city. They also happened to be the exit since it is between the two that prisoners were executed, looking at the clock so they knew exactly when they died. Nice thought huh? As far as other major sights that we saw besides the Rialto bridge which was cool but it was just a bridge with shops on it, even if it is the oldest one in Venice. Anyway we went to the Academia museum, which is the most famous in Venice and toured around looking at the paintings. most of the depicted a biblical scene or a story from Catholicism which is what my mom enjoyed looking at most since neither of us are really the artistic type, but they were beautiful paintings.
As for my favorite part of the trip it would have to be the shopping. Everything there was just so cool. My favorite thing that I saw and luckily it was everywhere! were the masks that are traditional in Venice for the Carnival that takes place in February. They were all so amazing i had a hard time keeping my eyes off of them. During our tour we found out that the masks were used during the early venetian period as a way for politicians to keep the anonymity while doing deals that may have questionable morals. After finding this out I realized why I liked them so much :). Prostitutes however were not allowed to wear them, their identities had to be known, as well as commoners. Only those with status or a title could wear them. The glass that came from Murano island was also incredibly cool.
I decided this blog would be less of a day to day occurrence and more about what I liked and disliked. As I have said in my other blogs if you want to know anything else about it just ask. If I think of anything else I'll make a new blog about it.Thanks for reading!