Venice

After what seemed to be an eternity, we finally arrived in Venice! To get here, we took a 3 hour flight from HCMC to Hong Kong, stayed overnight in the HK airport, took a 13 hour flight to London Heathrow, had to transfer over to London Gatwick (1 hour bus ride and $80 later), and took a 1.5 hour flight to Venice. Needless to say, it was a really long 40-whatever hours. Our saving grace was being in business class and having access to the airport lounges where we could shower and freshen up.

We didn't arrive into Venice until 11pm and the city was a bit eerie. There is no rhyme or reason to street names and numbers and we were navigating with a bad map with no street names. Miraculously, we found our B&B and passed out.

But we uncovered the beauty of Venice the next day...everything we'd read and heard about Venice is true - from the gondolas rowed by the men in striped shirts, to streets so narrow you have to walk in a single file, to the checkered tablecloths, to the amazing food and wine. It's all here!

We were told by a few people the best way to see Venice is just to get lost and we did just that on the first day...both on purpose and not on purpose since we didn't have the best of maps. Didn't matter, we eventually found our way around.

Within about five minutes of stepping outside, a pigeon decided to leave Steven a little present on his shirt. :/

A few random pictures:

What do you eat for your first lunch in Italy? Pizza of course! We scarfed down half of the pizza before realizing that maybe we should take a picture. Both were really good.

Venice is known for their Carnival masks and glass blowing - we peeked inside two stores and saw how they were made with painstaking detail:

We eventually meandered over to St. Mark's Square to admire the madhouse - there were so.many.people. Can't imagine what this place looks like in July and August, it must be a complete nightmare (or Stephanie's version of a nightmare). We admired the outside of the impressive buildings but since we weren't wearing pants, we couldn't access the inside.

For some reason, people really like to feed the pigeons...it's a bit gross, unless you don't mind multiple "pigeon presents:"

We walked over to Harry's Bar, famous for supposedly inventing the Bellini and attracting famous people, only to be turned away (again!) due to Steven wearing shorts. We were planning on returning the following day but couldn't really justify the 15 euros (about $23) for a small drink. Regardless, this sign made us chuckle - and trust us, we were going to milk this one if we had returned for a drink even though we (fortunately) do not have a subprime loan.

The next morning, we had our usual cappuccino and croissant on the rooftop deck at our B&B as we had done the previous day:

We wisely put on some pants so we could access St. Mark's Basilica and headed out early so we could beat the morning rush. Not sure if there is a "slow" time in St. Mark's Square because we arrived at 9:15am and the doors don't even open until 9:45am - this is the view from the top, around 10am:

There were about 5 different lines going, all for different parts of the square, and of course we entered the wrong one. We were just following the herd and ended up getting yelled at by a bunch of people who were angry that we were "cutting in line." Oops. It really didn't matter, we were all going to end up in the same place, right?

Cameras are not allowed in the Basilica, but Steven took some sneaky, non-flash photos - sadly, they did not turn out so well, but you can see the rays of sunlight pouring through.

View from the outside, overlooking the main square:

And then we had to take a ride in the gondola...as cheesy as it is, we couldn't go to Venice and not have a man row us around the canals. It cost us a small fortune, but we can now say we've done it and we'll never have to do it again.

We ended our stay in Venice with an amazing dinner at a local restaurant and finished with some Tiramisu, which originated here. Mmmmm...so good!

It's good to be back in Europe!