March 11-14th, 2009, First Anniversary in Venice, Italy
My god, already a year married! Time's marching on, so we took a 99 Euro flight from Frankfurt to Venice ...
... and landed there on Wednesday afternoon ... and took the "water bus" to Venice ... here a photo approaching the city ...
Finally we arrived at our hotel (photo), where we had a wonderful suite (top three windows on the left) ...
... with a breathtaking view over the harbour and just about 50 metres from San Marco Square!
Immediately we started a first walk through the city and made a stop at the famous Rialto bridge ...
... here us on the bridge ...
... saw many Asian tourists amongst others, here some on a boat ...
... and continued to walk through numerous little alleys, crossed channels ... we could show you a hundred pictures ...
... but as we are nice ... here's just another one ... unfortunately - to be honest - most of the buildings in a bad condition ...
... and finished the first walk at San Marco Square.
The evening ended in a nice little bar, where we had a couple of Italian wines.
Next day we continued our walks through Venice and - with lovely sunshine - took a gondola ride in the afternoon ... according to the gondoliere the "Ferrari" version due to the colour.
Adriano, our gondoliere, was nice and informative. We were lucky that not too many tourists were in town, so we had a quiet ride through the little canals ... and finally we entered "canale grande" ... here on the photo the Rialto bridge in the background.
Here an example of some of the amazing buildings we encountered along the way.
In the evening - our anniversary, 12th March - we had a nice dinner at the restaurant "Do Leoni" ... so we can put Venice on our list of "anniversary locations".
Next day we drove to the island of Murano (glas industry) by boat ... unfortunately to find out, that the factory there just wanted to sell their products to us ... the photo shows interesting reflections on the boat roof ...
... so we took the boat back and had a nice view of San Marco square from the boat ...
... another long walk brought us to the Jewish quarter, the first ghetto of the world (16th century) ... and having a rest at a nice cafe ...
... in the evening we tried an original venetian restaurant (according to our travel guide) ... just to find out, that the look and taste of "squid cooked in its own ink with polenta" (see photo) leaves a lot to be desired ... Remark Thomas: I had to use the above wording on Cynthia's request ... to not offend people.
... so after cleaning Cynthia's tongue from the black ink we ended up in "our" little bar and had a "wine dinner". Thomas still smiling ... guess why ...
Here's our little bar at night ...
... and on Saturday, after a really good guided tour, we had our last lunch in Venice and flew back home in the evening.
Finally a funny photo of "Italian lifestyle" ...So Venice was a wonderful experience, very expensive (glass of beer 7 Euros), but definitely worth a visit and a great way to celebrate our first anniversary!