Venezia

This morning we had a nice simple breakfast of cappuccinos and croissants at the hotel before heading to St. Mark's. We decided to take the advice of several people who have been to Venice before and took one of the "vaporetti" boats through the Grand Canal - just for the experience. These boats are basically Venice's equivalent to city buses. We took the slow one and enjoyed the cruise.

At St. Mark's, we fed the pigeons, which was fun and completely unsanitary. 

Then we walked around. We happened to walk past Venice's Hard Rock Cafe and found ourselves facing a huge crowd of people and men linking arms to keep people away from the restaurant entrance. Celebrity perhaps? I think not. A man came out and addressed the gathering crowd in Italian before five people (of some importance, I guess) came out and bashed a bunch of guitars over cinder blocks. There were news cameras and clapping. I'm still puzzled.

After this, Jenny and I moseyed from the general St. Mark's area, across the Rialto Bridge and back to the station area, which is where we are staying. 

We then took it easy for a few hours before rallying and walking back to St. Mark's for the evening. We were quite delighted when we found that the city was preparing for "acqua alta." It's been rainy and stormy which are apparently flood conditions...makes sense. So the boards were being positioned in front of shop doors and the boardwalks were being set up by groups of uniformed men. They even sounded their "alarm" around 8:30 p.m. Their alarm is actually quite unalarming. It starts like a normal siren, but then these little chime-like sounds play that actually sound like someone playing crystal water glasses. Anyway, we HAD to stick around for a while to watch things develop. Walking around in St. Mark's Square, water was bubbling up out of the street drains and over the course of a few hours, the square turned into one big puddle. Kids rain through it in their boots and we watched a fair share of tourists stepping unintentionally into puddles that were inches deep. The reactions were varied. It made for entertaining people-watching.

Below, there is a picture of the water coming up out of the drain at the beginning of the evening and the second is of the front of St. Mark's an hour or two later. 

After a while, we walked back and are now about to crash for the evening. Tomorrow it will be off to our next destination - Milan.