Thursday, June 14, 2012

Day one in Venice we were able to get off the ship around 12:30.  It was a bit of a hoof to the Termini where we could get a Venice card ticket which would give us unlimited use of the vaporettos/traghettos.  It's a bit like the metro to get around (sign wise etc) and we screwed up on our first trip, heading in the wrong direction, but quickly got the whole thing down and were on our way to Fondamente Nove and off to the surrounding islands including:
San Michelle - the walled cemetery which was also pretty darn neat
Murano -  where we walked around a bit.  Glass blowing was only from 10-12 so we didn't get to see that.
Burano - where we also walked around a bit.  We did see one woman working lace here, so that was neat.  We also saw teenagers pull up in their boat at one point.  I mean, it makes sense, teenagers drive here, too, but it seemed odd at first.  Amusingly they had pink carpet and fuzzy dice in their boat!  We picked up a lacey looking Venetian mask for Dani and a small lace (obviously not hand made given the reasonable price) butterfly for me.

We did spend a lot of time on vaporettos as a result, so I'm glad we got these in on the first day.  That with our longer walk back to the ship brought us in at 8, just enough time to clean up.  Oddly, since we were overnight in this port we didn't eat at our regular dinner table and they didn't have a normal show.  Instead of the show they had the newlywed game this evening, which I missed a good chunk of to get cleaned up from a warm day.  For dinner you head in at will like you do at lunch time.  We ended up at a dinner table w/ a couple from Ireland and 3 couples from South Africa.

Of the South African couples 3/6 ppl had issues with something being stolen or attempted to be stolen in Barcelona!  I got a bit of a laugh during the conversation when NASCAR came up and the one tried to explain to the other the difference between it and stock car type racing.  She ended up saying it's kind of zef which promptly led to me noting that I had fallen for the band Die Antwoord.  Turned out the gentleman closest to me knows Yolandi's father, who is a minister!  They recommended a few other bands for me to check out (fokofpolisiekar and snothead/snotnose - at least that's what it translates to) that I'll need to see about, so that was a fun and interesting meal. After dinner we went up for 'pub night' which was basically sing alongs.

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