868

868. I have 868 pictures from Venice. 2 days, 868 pictures. Granted, I had two cameras there, and Laura had an absolute blast with my big camera, so there's a ton of pictures that are just completely random. I put a bunch on here, but if you want to see the rest they're on my google/picasa account Here.

There's a lot of pictures there, mostly of things and people, but some are so cool! So let's see. Before I start on Venice, I'll see if there's anything from last week. I guess the only interesting thing I did (wait a minute, I'm in Italy... I do interesting things all the time :)) was I joined the other art class on their trip to the Duomo Baptistry. That was cool. It was built on Roman foundations that can still be seen beneath the grates. There's so much history here! And with Mariotti at the helm, we learn it all. Story about Mariotti later in my post. A hint, I'm pretty sure she or her husband is in the Maffia. Pretty sure. We googled it. But that's to come.

So early Friday morning we left for Venice. The bus ride there was great in itself. Well at least the first half. The Pennines are gorgeous. The road is high up in the mountains, and so we drove half-way through the clouds through these green mountains with countryside villas, and it was just perfect. Funny how out of my 868 pictures I didn't get one of the mountains. Oh well. We finally got into Venice, and not 5 minutes in to our boat ride to Morano (the glass making island) our boat got pulled over. I think for speeding, but I'm not quite sure. This began our first experience with Venitian men in uniform. I don't know if it's something in the water or what, but all the policemen in Venice were amazingly good looking :)

St. Mark's Square

Alright, so the following pictures may require a bit of an explanation. We visited the glass blowers in Morano, and I have never been so amazed in such a short amount of time. First it was great when he just whipped out a glass vase in a minute. However then he started to work on his second one. We thought just another vase, but then he started pulling and twisting, and in 45 seconds, bam there was a horse!!

Yeah. Crazy.

St. Mark's!

The canal our hotel was on

View from another window of our hotel

Alright, so another situation that takes some explanation. And here's where Mariotti's maffia background comes in. We've realized that Mariotti is a wealth of information about history, art, architecture and such. However we've begun to notice that she pretty much always gets what she wants. For example, our Friday night in Venice. We all met outside St Mark's Cathedral per our instructions that night, and Mariotti informed us that we were going to get a private viewing. Impressive, right? It gets better. We enter this dark church, and she has us all sit in the center. She goes and talks to the Director. Next comes possibly the most holy experience of my life. Even if you weren't at all religious you would have been moved. In absolute silence for about 5 minutes, the director gradually turned on all the lights, one by one. It was just awe inspiring. The ceiling is completely made of gold, and seeing it in different lights was phenomenal.

And so after this great experience Mariotti gave us a bit more history, then in an off-hand manner, said "Now they don't normally do this, but let's see if they'll let us up to the alter" After a quick chat with the Director, there we were. And THEN we got to see the coolest thing ever. The director cranks this handle, and the altarpiece swings around to reveal this:
I'm fairly certain that you could feed all of Africa for a year just from all the gold, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and millions of other precious gems on this mosaic. She made a similar agreement to get us down into the crypts. So cool!! We were all left in awe after this excursion.

We had a great dinner too. By the end of our meal we were the only ones left in the restaurant, so the staff (our waiter was super cute!!) started joking around with us and keeping us company. The chef Alberto was a riot. He insisted on getting pictures with all of us, kissing him.

We were fairly tired, so we went back and passed out (due to tiredness, not alcohol I swear!) We decided that we wanted to take full advantage of Venice while were here, so we woke up at 5:30 the next morning to watch the sun come up. Soooooooo worth it :)

The city was still asleep and fairly empty. It was almost eerie. But oh so great. It was fun to see the city wake up and come to life. Fun!

After breakfast and a tour with Mariotti of the Academia museum, we decided to wander and eventually head out to the Peggy Guggenheim modern art museum. And guess what, there was water in St. Mark's!! We were so excited!!

We started to wonder what it would be like if random tourists came and took pictures of our laundry...

I'm too scared to count how many pictures of canals I have

Overall one of the most amazing trips ever. We were all pretty tired on the bus ride home. Well that is until Laura and I started a dance party. This week has been great so far. Last night we went out for Julian's birthday, and I found some Danes!! They were here for school for a few days, and they were so excited to find out that I was Danish. They taught me how to properly say Aero, the island that Grandma's from, along with a lot of other words and phrases. I just thought it was great to find Danes in Italy. Who knew? We were going to head down to Sicily this weekend, but our €30 ticket jumped to €85, sooooo we're sticking around Florence. Perhaps we'll visit some little towns around here and explore some other parts of Florence. Vedremo! (We'll see!)