 |
| The Campanile (rebuilt in 1902) |
Early Friday morning, immediately after Adam got back from Zagreb for a Fulbright meeting, we took off for Venice in a rental car with our brand new Garmin Nuvi, preloaded with full coverage of all the European countries you would ever possibly want to visit (and partial coverage of all the rest). Unfortunately, not understanding the Croatian directions, we inadvertently programmed it to communicate with us in Croatian. After pushing every possible configuration of buttons, I got it programmed for the Tronchetto parking lot to which we were headed, but we mainly used it this way: if the Garmin started talking, we started watching the signs on the highway. And in this fashion, we made it without a single wrong turn to Venice, three hours from our apartment.
 |
| The first serious costumes out of thousands we saw |
We took the vaporetto #2 directly to San Marco Piazza from the Tronchetto car park, and already there were people in the ferry dressed to the nines for Carnivale. As we wound our way through the square in the direction of our hotel, we caught the end of a procession of costumed people, I suppose these were all entries in a best-costume contest because the costumes could not have been more thorough and elaborate. We had a gelato and watched this parade. After the ice cream, we quickly found the Hotel San Gallo, just 50m (about 2 minutes) from the piazza, unloaded our backpack and went out to find something real to eat. Our meal was mediocre, but the wine valpolicella did what it was supposed to do and we had a fun time meandering through the swelling crowds, crossing footbridges, getting lost, taking the elevator to the top of the Campanile, pointing out all the winged lions, but mainly fighting the crowds and gawking at the elaborate costumes which were everywhere. Essentially, a dozen people would stand in front of a particularly outlandish costume and snap photos, while the person in the costume would nod slightly and bow when he or she had to move on. Typically, the Venetian masks hide the entire face, but on the rare occasion that the mask only covered the top of the face, I swear I could see signs of exasperation around the mouth wrinkles. In Venice during Carnivale, snapping pictures actually makes you fit in.
 |
Us, plus Zoltan, Anita, Zofie (masked), Peti
|
It was our Hungarian friends Zoltan and Anita who first proposed we meet in Venice this particular weekend. We arranged to meet at the Rialto bridge between 10 and 10:20, and by racing through thick crowds in unfamiliar, unmapped territory, with their two kids, after riding overnight in a bus from Budapest, they made it! We had a nice coffee (hot chocolate for kids) and explored a bit of the town together, opting for a traghetto ride across a canal instead of the more stereotypical gondola ride. The kids were all perched on the edge of the boat, with nothing between them and the Adriatic, while the waves caused by other motorboats made this ride one of the kids' highlights. Later (with starving kids again), near the Academia bridge, we found an restaurant with very good food but terrible service. The waiter informed us that it was very busy and if we didn't order right then, well... then when we did order, he made Anita feel very bad for changing her order even though he hadn't even left our table. But again, the wine was good and we were fortified to fight our way through the masses again.
By this point, though, the crowds were almost impassable, and losing a kid would have been a disaster. So around five, we decided to go back to the hotel (at which point we forgot to take the bottle of Hungarian wine that our friends had brought and carried around all day for us!) and make our way back to our car. Thanks to our Croatian GPS, we got lost in the windy mountain roads of Trieste but fortunately did not wind up on the Slovenian autostrada.
I was in Venice in 1990 and remember all the pigeons in San Marco square -- there is a picture of me from my Franklin College days of about 100 pigeons sitting on me or flying around me, probably eating bird food I bought in the square. Today, feeding the pigeons is against the rules. I also think that Venice is not quite as smelly, and it was even colder when I visited in 1990. There are certainly spots where you think "sewer," and there are probably more of these spots in the summer, but the canal water was as clear as clear can be, and trash was at a minimum even with the millions of tourists there.
 |
| Coming or going on the vaporetto |
We'll be back in Venice in early May with my parents, and will hopefully have some time to do the things that the crowds prohibited us from doing, but we had a weekend of highlights spent with friends.
 |
| Rialto Bridge |
 |
| On the traghetto |
 |
| On the traghetto |
 |
| A couple tourists |
 |
| View from the Campanile |
