When the moon hits your eye...

For the last part of our trip we traveled up to Venice. Everybody we spoke to said it was best to avoid the crowds and simply get lost, so that’s what we did. There is a main artery of tourists running from the train station to St. Peter’s Basilica, so we just deviated from this souvenir-lined road of strobing camera flashes and headed for the side streets. We wandered passed street musicians and local vegetable markets and even found a communist meetinghouse on one of our tiki-tours. Venice is basically a small island so you can wander off without ending up too far from where you are staying.

It really is an incredible place. One of the first things we noticed was the peaceful silence because of the absence of cars. The roads were just wide enough for pedestrians, only a meter or two in some places, and the buildings towered up a few stories on either side to make it a kind of maze, but every now and then we would stumble on a small bridge over one of the beautiful canals, facing down an alley with rainbows of washing strung between windows, or end up in a plaza with beautiful ancient buildings and statues. One of the funnier sights was a row of gondolas filled with tourists in a watery traffic jam with the gondoliers all yelling at each other in a scene of anti-tranquility that I doubt the tourists didn’t shell out €50 to experience.

The weather was beautiful so we spent part of the afternoon snoozing in the shade of the trees in a park right next to the ocean. Eventually we did head to the Basilica, which was incredible, but more interesting were the pigeons in the square. You could buy little bags of seeds and then feed the birds, but many people would hold the seeds out in their hands and the pigeons would fly up to land on their arms, shoulders and head to get the seeds. This led to an amusing incident later with Amber demonstrating a Pavlov’s Dog effect when, describing what people were doing, she briefly held out her seedless hands in an unconscious illustration and the pigeons launched an immediate offensive.

We concluded our trip by blowing whatever money we had left on an amazing dinner at a restaurant right on the water. Very memorable! We even got Brock join in on the oysters (and he ended up really liking them!) Wandering the peaceful Venetian streets together at night after a great meal was definitely a highlight of the trip. It comes in as a close second on the trip highlight list to hearing Italian people actually say, “Mamma Mia!