Day 59: City of Bridges

There was obviously no post yesterday. By the time I got into Venice it was pretty late in the day, and other than a few early morning pictures in Switzerland and a few unexceptional ones from the train I didn't really have anything to put up. I don't want to get into that day in detail, but let's just say that it involved a little more money, a lot more time and considerably more bizarre events than scheduled.

My hostel in Venice is on the mainland, outside of what everybody thinks of as Venice. To get to the island bit - the part with all the canals - is a 10-15 minute bus ride, but the bus stops right in front of where I am, so it's not bad at all to get there. The island is split roughly in half by a main central canal that snakes through the middle, with numerous side canals throughout. There are no cars in this area, just boats and pedestrians. Having to get everywhere by foot suits me just fine, since that's what I generally do anyway, but Venice required a few tweaks to my usual tactics for exploring. Normally I've found that if I spend a day wandering around on my own I can run across much of the interesting things in the city without having to plan out what to see or how to get there. Then, in subsequent days I can hunt down things of interest I didn't run across and make sure I don't miss anything important to me. The problem with Venice is that a lot of my usual rules for navigating and finding interesting things don't work. In most places, a street's size is somewhat proportional to how important it is/how often it's used. In Venice, some of main throughfares to big interesting sites would be tiny alleys that are almost invisible until you run across them. More than once today I'd think I had reached a dead end (which there are many of) only to see somebody emerge from a narrow alley at the end that I couldn't see the entrance to. Streets/alleys tend to be winding and short, splitting off into yet more alleys or small squares, so you can't just pick a street and follow it east to get east. At first I tried to keep my bearings by sticking along the central canal, but there aren't actual paths that run along it for most stretches - just alleyways that intersect it, coming to a dead end at the water.

I spent the morning on the roughly western side of the central canal. This is the much quieter side, where there are much fewer people and shops, and more residential. There are a lot of small museums and galleries around, but Venice is more about the atmosphere, so I've been skipping most of these. I did make one exception to visit Gallerie dell'Accademia which is the most famous in the city.

In the afternoon I crossed over the eastern side, and things got a lot more busy. I found my way to the piazza San Marco which is the largest and most famous square in the city. It did have some pretty great buildings, but also a lot of tourists. Further east, at the edge of the island, things got even worse. From what I saw this is the area where all the giant cruise ships dock and all the people swarm off them to grab their brief tastes of Venice in excursions. I really dislike big crowds of tourists, so I wasn't too fond of a lot of this area, but I perservered to see the bits that seemed interesting. How ironic that hiking all day up and down mountains leaves me full of energy, but a few hours of walking through crowds in Venice exhausts me.

Virtually all of the merchandise shops broke down into one of three categories: designer fashion, crappy touristy shops, or pretty high end artsy places. Of the three, obviously the third was the most interesting to me (although some of the clothing stores did look very impressive, just not anything I can buy). One of the big items in Venice is masks, and there is a huge variety of them. Carnivale happens in February, but apparently (at least for tourists) buying masks is a year-round thing. Almost every tourist shop sells cheap, generic versions of these masks, but the specialists - the ones where you can see them actually crafting elaborate masks - are really impressive. I took a few pictures of one shop in particular that seemed to be the best in town. It apparently made the masks for a few big movies, and it seemed to have some creative twists the others didn't.

In summary, Good Venice:

(Not good because it's a gondola builder's, which is pretty cool, but because it's in the area away from all the touristy stuff, where there was that atmosphere of locals working real jobs)

Bad Venice: