Italy Part 3 - Venice

How come nobody told me jet lag could linger for almost a week after you get back from a trip? Brad is having major trouble sleeping and we both woke up at 4:30am all this week!

Anyway, Venice....we had a great dinner the night we got there.

I'll be honest though - it's seriously overrun in areas with tourists. I almost panicked when we arrived - think Disney stores, McDonald's and streets where you can barely walk. It just wasn't what I was expecting from Venice.

It got better though....see?

Anyway, a map of our one full day in Venice....it is by no means accurate. I think that is the whole point of Venice - to get completely lost and enjoy yourself anyway.

We started out from our hotel.....the cute little Hotel Bernardi.....!

.....and made our way to the Vaporetto ('public boat') and went directly to San Marco which is the main attraction in Venice. On the way......


At this point, I had had ENOUGH of the animals (err....tourists) so I wasn't willing to wait for two hours in a lineup to see the inside of the buildings. I just wanted to get out of there and explore the quiet side of Venice. I'm so glad we did because we got to see a lot. (See my map above.)

So we got out of there and wandered around for a bit and took the boat across the water again and walked along the 'shore' of Venice.

We decided to find this particular square and see if there were any good restaurants for a late lunch. We found a fantastic little place and had an awesome lunch here.

I think this place was super memorable for me because we had such a great time here. We kicked back in the shade, had good iced coffees and killed ourselves laughing the entire time. It was fantastic. The food was great too - click on the photo to see the size of the capers Brad had.

Do it.
After this, we kept wandering and stumbled on this basilica. It's called Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. We paid the four euros to go inside and it was worth it.....seriously the strangest church ever. More on that later......I promise.

We ended up over in the Jewish Ghetto, which is a great area - less tourists, more locals. We popped into a wine bar and had some fantastic wine and bruschetta. I love this photo with our shadows....

After this we walked home, had some tiramsu on the way and fell into bed ready to leave for Florence the next day.