Last updated November 23, 1997

Taking the train from Innsbruck we eventually got to Venice. Our path took us through few more train changes (and cities) than absolutely necessary, the whole of which we will not go into here because, although it would be wonderfully amusing for all of you, it would be terribly embarassing for us. Suffice it to say, we got to Venice.

To start off our visit, we were in a state of confusion. Somehow, we had lost an hour traveling from Austria to Italy. Our mental geography told us that time zone boundaries seldom run horizontally, only after some time did we realize that daylight savings time had slipped out from underneath us unknowingly.

At the train station we got our public transportation tickets and waited for one of the boat lines to take us to our hotel on the island of Lido. The boats were not the fastest form of transportation and by the time we got checked in, it was too dark for picture taking. So we had dinner.

The next day, we got to the dock early. We decided that we would try to beat everyone else onto the boat to secure one of the outside seats for picture taking. What we didn't realize was that nobody else wanted those seats because it was VERY COLD outside. So we lost a few layers of unimportant skin, but we got some good pictures.


After another good hour on the boat, we finally got to the San Marco Square. The first thing you notice about the square is that there is an unnatural number of pigeons around. There were so many, that when wading through them (and you did have to wade), you tended to kick some, accidently. Yes, it really was accidental, if it wasn't, we would've gotten much better distance.


We went into the San Marco Basillica, which was beautiful. Every visible surface was filled with colorful mosaics of glittering glass and tiles. The background of all of these was some sort of gold-painted tile. It made the walls and ceiling shine. The floors were patterned with intricately inlaid marble in more colors than we had ever seen before. Climbing up yet more stairs (we never will learn) allowed us to get the shot of the square that you see above. We will admit that the floor patterns was scanned from a postcard, but all of the other pictures you see on our pages are ours.


Although we were on our honeymoon, and the gondola rides are supposed to be very romantic, we decided to skip it. For some reason, being on a tiny watercraft with 5 degree celcius (yes, we've started thinking in metric) temperatures, and shearing winds just didn't seem very appealing.


We did try to taste some of the local cuisine while we were in the Venezia region. We did divide up the labor, though. Andy would taste all of the things that were slimey and I would taste the others. I enjoyed the carpaccio, which is thinly sliced raw beef in olive oil with parmesian cheese. Andy, on the other hand, got a plate of black slimey squid in it's own ink. He then had the nerve to eat it. All. Right in front of me. Well, I survived the experience.

The next morning, we hopped a train for Florence.


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