Venice- The Stockholm of the South

Who goes to visit Venice in the middle of winter you ask? Well, Giselle (Blake’s older sister) is a ballet dancer in Dresden, Germany, and she doesn’t get a lot of time off, and so when she did recently, she wanted to meet up with her bro and to get out of Dresden. So we found the cheapest place to fly into for both of us (although in retrospect, even though it was cheap to get there, it wasn’t so cheap once we actually got there, but, oh well- I got to take a weekend in Venice! Hecks yeah!).

Blake and I didn’t get in until really late on Friday night, and by the time we figured our way to our hotel through the bus and water bus system, we were ready to crash. So that brings us to Saturday...

We had decided to not rush to see certain things, and just wanted to take in the city by walking around it. For most of the day there wasn’t any big “blog-worthy” story, we just had a really good time getting lost and exploring the city. The city is absolutely gorgeous, and the weather was a little on the chilly side, but compared to Sweden, it wasn’t bad, and the sun was shining, so we were happy.

If you haven’t been there before, Venice is a city that is mostly on water, and it is connected by a series of canals and bridges. There are no streets, which means no cars, which makes it a very quiet city. It is actually a little unsettling at times when it is really quiet. But it is absolutely beautiful. I had a lot of fun just trying to capture it on film. Here are a few of my favorite pics that I managed to take, but if you want to see all my pics (well all the decent ones), click here.

One of the funnier things was the random spotting of a he/she walking the streets in a bright blue outfit, complete with fuzzy blue jacket, hat, glasses, and matching shoes. We were trying to get a picture without drawing attention to what we were doing, so we could only get her (?) from the back:

Oh yeah, and there was the whole Gaza war protest thing. We wanted to check out the Jewish ghetto, but a) forgot it was Saturday, and b) there were a ton of police in riot gear in that area just hanging out. We couldn’t figure out why the police where there, until we saw a very large group walking across the bridge towards the Jewish Ghetto. Blake got this picture from a slight distance:

There were a few Jewish people standing at a distance just watching it, and we noticed a few people on the bridge making gestures in their direction. The whole thing was a little unsettling, especially for such a complicated situation.

On Saturday night we met up with one of Blake’s friends from Lund, Carlo at a bar not too far from San Marco (I think... I didn’t look at the map the whole weekend, which was awesome- thanks Blake and Giselle for being my navigator!).

Most of the evening was spent drinking outdoors, which was a little weird since it was only slightly above freezing outside, but it was a lot of fun. I even met some Italian guy who wants to study at the campus that I work on in Stockholm, so that was random. I may have told him I could help him, which doesn’t make sense, since I have absolutely no connections to the University itself... hmmm.. oh well!

The next day we were a little sluggish, but rallied to go to the Academia, which is a museum filled with Venetian art. It was ok... nothing spectacular. Most of the museum was closed off, so maybe the other half that we couldn’t see is better.

The rest of the day was spent enjoying the city again, and then we got on a water bus, and then a bus, and then headed home!