Venezia: Day Four

Wednesday, March 9 was one of the most awesome days of my entire life. We started by heading out to Murano early in the morning where I started searching for some glass cups to match the ones Granddad has. We looked at a couple of glass shops, which was really interesting. I took a long video showing how they make the glass, I'll show y'all that when I get back to the US. For now here's a snapshot:

Glass artists at work as they have been on Murano for a thousand years

After searching around for a while I did find glasses that would nearly match the set Granddad had but they were going to cost about $500 even after I negotiated a significant discount from the factory. The actual retail value in stores was near $2000. So I called Mom and Dad to see how bad they wanted the glasses, they said it wasn't that important. I'll bring Mom back to Venezia in a few years when I can afford the glasses and let her pick them out.

The main canal in Murano

So it was fun checking out the way the glasiers worked, I spent the rest of the morning on the Island haning out with Stephanie, Alexis, and Chalyce looking for some other things. There was a boat strike that day so we had to take a realy long slow route back to our hotel on Lido. That afternoon Stephanie and I had lunch at a cafe, where I managed to find a pretty decent hamburger, then we went to see the Venetian beach. It was pretty wierd being on the beach in cold and windy weather, but it was neat also to see the Mediteranean up close. The ancient people apparently always regarded the Mediteran more as a lake than an ocean, despite its size, and after seeing it in this context I can surely understand why. In Sorrento I had a chance to see the sea from the top of some big cliffs, and way below me I could see the water splashing up on the rocks, but I couldn't really get a sense of the motion of the water as it would appear from the shore. Here on the shores of Lido I was able to see the water as the ancient people would have, and truly the shore is very calm, hardly any waves at all. It really is nearly completely flat on the sea, and if it weren't salty I'd say it was no different from the Great Lakes.

After this we headed back to the hotel where I chilled for a bit and watched BBC world to get an idea of what was happening around the planet. Just for the record I am still horribly uninformed. I can't read Italian well enough to understand the subtleties of the newspaper articles, only the gist of what's happened in Italy.

After watching TV for a bit I headed with Dave, Jason, Bo, and Diego to get some Venetian Mexican food. Again the boat strike slowed us down dramatically, so we took about an hour to get to the restaraunt. Finally we found it, and we were really excited to see and smell Mexican food for the first time in two months. Now, when we actually got the food I have to say it wasn't really Mexican food. It was close, it looked like Mexican food, but it wasn't spicy at all and it didn't have quite the right flavor. Perhaps more relevantly the portions were very very small and rather expensive, so it didn't really remind any of us of the Tex-Mex back home. Still, it was a great break from Italian food (which I don't really like) and it made me feel fantastic to get some variety back in my diet.

After chowing on Mexican food Dave and I went to meet Jim at the train station, from where we were going to walk to Campo San Margherita, which is apparently the hot spot of the Venetian night life. At some point either during this little jaunt or perhaps earlier we had decided we needed to name the poster girl of Italy... which leads me to a side story.

So in every Italian town there is one dominant poster advertisement which simply overwhelms all the others. When I say overwhelms I mean dramatically and emphatically outnumbers the placement of all other ads. It wouldn't be unheard of for a town's main advertisement to appear 20 or 30 times in various forms around just one Piazza. So one of the major advertisers in Italy is the Intimissimi brand of underwear and stuff. Think of it as the Victoria's Secret of Italy. Now, there is one particular poster that Intimissimi puts up all over the place. It's their only advertisement really, and we had already seen it many times before we arrived in Venezia, but when we got there it was rediculously more prominent. Litterally this poster is EVERYWHERE in the city. With no further adieu, here is the poster:

We named her Missi

Now, we're a bunch of unattached guys walking around in a country where for two months we haven't really seen any pretty girls except the ones that came with us from Texas (who are all taken). Then this girl is everywhere we go, staring at us, taunting us with the idea that amazing Italian women do exist. It's torture, and we talked about this at length. Hence we had no choice but to name this terrible siren who we could never seem to escape, and we named her Missi. End of the side story...

So while walking through the town we were just chatting and deciding on the name Missi, and we started to realize we were basically in the most deserted town any of us had ever been in. Venezia is really a dead place, hardly anything goes on there aside from tourism because the population has almost vanished in the face of the extraordinary cost of living on the island. Nowadays people just work on the island in some tourism related business and live on the mainland where it's cheap (and ugly). It was really kind of disheartening to walk around a deserted city. But along the way we found a Pizza delivery place that was open and which sold .8 Liter bottles of Birra Moretti, so we all stopped and grabbed a bottle and walked the rest of the way down to the Campo San Margherita drinking our cheap Italian beer and joking about how empty the city was. Another long side story involves Jim wondering what would happen if we were to be confronted by Italians, and my shouting "attenzione la bottiglia!" I'll explain that one in person if any of you want to know.

So we finally found the campo San Margherita. Actually it was pretty dead. Venezia just doesn't have enough people left living on the island to support a night life. We hung out for a long time though and saw an AWESOME bar fight which involved people being thrown out on the street and throwing chairs around. Dave caught a lot of this on video.

After a while some of the other Aggies showed up and we hung with them at the bar for a while watching a recap of all the soccer games from around the world. Eventually we decided it was time to leave the bar and head home, and again because of the boat strike we new it would take a long time to get home. We started off in the direction of Piazza San Marco, which was the only place we could catch a boat home. There was one problem on the way though, which involved the nature of everything being closed in Venezia and the fact that there are no bathrooms anywhere. We devised a solution to this problem, but not to incriminate myself I am not going to put it online. Again that's a story to tell in person.

We finally made it home and crashed. I guess that's a pretty long narrative for the day but it was a really awesome rockin' good time, and a bunch of different stuff happened along the way that I could elaborate on for anyone who is interested some other time. Just ask, I'll tell the stories. Seriously though this was one of the best days of my life. Only drawback was I didn't get as much sleep as I could have for Venezia: Day Five.