Turning 21 in Venice

PICTURES OF ROME AND VENICE ON THE LINKS OVER THERE!! --->


Water water everywhere…That’s Venice. Just to recap, I’ve so far been to Paris for Valentine’s Day, Dublin for Saint Patty’s Day and Rome for Easter...what more could a girl ask for? Venice for her 21st birthday maybe? Yes. And it was fantastic. I’d feel too bad for the other cities if I said that Venice was my favorite of them all – but let’s just say I love love LOVE Venice.

But just to backtrack for a second…on the day before my birthday, last Thursday, I was surprised with flowers and then my roommates set up a whole birthday décor in our little kitchen – complete with noisemakers, signs, champagne, cake, and giant multi-colored cardboard birthday ties. Like a tie a guy wears, yes. Weird, but kind of funny when we got all our friends and Nick to wear them out later, ha ha. Anyway, it was a fabulous day-before-birthday. I went out to dinner with a small group to a place right on the Arno River at the tip of the Ponte Vecchio, then headed home for cake and ice cream and wearing giant ties. Oh, and also I got to wave around a gold wand that Colleen and Allie bought for me, since most girls these days are wearing crowns for their 21st birthdays. I thought the wand was an even nicer idea, and absolutely loved waving it and tapping people with it all night. So, after cake we joined up with more friends, including Nick’s cousin Brianne who was in town for a few days, and went out to a club around here called, fittingly, TwentyOne. Lots of people go there all weekend, and it turned out to be a great night with lots of dancing and good company.

Too-early in the morning, Nick and I boarded a train to Venice for the weekend. It was now officially my birthday and so of course I got to be queen for the day and boss him around as much as I wanted. This pretty much meant I sent him to grab McDonald’s breakfast while I bought the train tickets and we hurried to catch the train as it almost left without us…

And so, we were suddenly riding across a sea of murky but pretty-blue water into the main island of Venice. I was so excited to see what this city had to offer, as it was unlike any other I’ve visited and I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from this fabled town-on-water. It turned out to be even more amazing than I thought. Leaving the train station, we landed at the edge of a main canal and followed our very confusing printed directions from there to the hotel. At every turn, I took more and more pictures, thinking this must be the prettiest bridge in Venice or this must be the cutest little house in Venice – only to find that the next bridge or the next turn or the next house was even more adorable. And when we made it to the hotel area, I fell in love with the beautiful piazza I found myself standing in. The cobble-stone square was surrounded by colorful shops and cafes, had benches and trees nestled in its center and was full of local Venetians walking dogs, sitting in the sun and enjoying cappuccinos. Though there were still tourists, our Piazza Margherita felt completely genuine Italian the whole time we were there, and never seemed less busy than that first view. From dawn till the wee hours of the morning there were people crowding the square, even when the rest of Venice seemed to still be sleeping. It was gorgeous under the sun and sparkling with life at night – I could not have asked for a better first taste of Venice.
After checking in to the hostel with our very cute old landlord (who we ended up discussing Italian agriculture and water shortages with later in the trip), I dropped my stuff in our room overlooking the square and headed off to explore the city. We ventured first to San Marco square, the main hustle and bustle tourist area of Venice, where pigeons flock by the thousands into the football-field-long piazza. To reach San Marco, it’s easiest to take a vaporetto (water-bus) and walk the boardwalk along to the square – though everything in Venice is really walking distance, even more so than tiny Florence. So we hopped a crowded boat to San Marco and joined the throngs of tourists gaping at masquerade masks, striped T-shirts and captain’s hats that Venetian vendors had for sale along the boardwalk. It seems that everyone coming to Venice wishes they were a gondolier. I’d hoped to ride a gondola, but it turns out they are super expensive and not really worth the money – it seemed better to spend that on a good birthday dinner later in the night. So, we explored San Marco square for a bit and even visited the Doge’s Palace – a huge column-lined palace on one edge of the square where the Doges (or Dukes) of Venice lived way back in the day when they had dukes. It paled in comparison to Versailles, since no palace can keep up now that I’ve seen the best, but still offered an interesting view of old Venetian royalty – especially the Duke private prisons, where he could torture and sneer at any prisoners he felt like holding there in his very own palace. The best room was the Great Council room, lined with portraits of all the old Doges, except for one that had been blacked out – a portrait of a Doge who had offended some officials and been accused of treason.

We left behind San Marco square for the evening and began the search for dinner – a restaurant in a back alley that Anthony Bourdain (of the Travel Channel show “No Reservations”) visited in his food-tasting episode on Venice. Even though I’d only been in Venice for a few hours, I knew already that we would get lost more than once. And sure enough, it took us probably 45 minutes to go in circles and find the place (not the first or last time we’d get lost in these winding tiny streets and curving canals). When we got there, we enjoyed appetizers standing at the bar, where they serve buffet-style servings to customers that want to sample a few things then move on to another place. It’s sort of like tapas, except with a 1 euro glass of wine and a variety of interesting Venetian seafoods. After, we walked along the Grand Canal in the center of the city and by the Rialto Bridge, the largest and most spectacular bridge of the city that has shops on it just like Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. The restaurants along this road were packed with tourists and we sat at one for a delicious birthday dinner of veggie soup, roast chicken and seafood spaghetti (mussels in Venice were great!). Since I’ve been collecting small souvenirs, receipts and ticket-stubs from everywhere I go, I asked the restaurant for a business card – but it seems they don’t speak English as much in Venice, and it was tough to communicate ‘business card’ for some reason, so the waiter ended up handing me some other table’s receipt with the name of the restaurant on it. We ended my 21st birthday watching a jazz quartet at a pub near our square and savoring chocolate mousse at the restaurant beneath our hotel. Perfect!

Saturday was island day. After hotel-provided croissants and cappuccinos, we visited the Peggy Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art – one of the many Guggenheims, and an impressive collection of art gathered by the American heiress. The museum actually used to be her home in the last thirty years of her life, right on the edge of the Grand Canal where she lived among the works of Dali, Jackson Pollack and Picasso. I’d never seen Picasso or Pollack originals in an exhibit before (mostly just Renaissance stuff in Florence!) so was psyched to see the abstract and unusual works Peggy had collected as her life’s work. Outside was a beautiful sculpture garden, a corner of which houses her grave and a plaque commemorating the gravesites of her twenty-some dogs. Quite the “museum.” So, we followed our modern art education with another vaporetto ride to San Marco Square and this time walked through Saint Mark’s Basilica – the main attraction and golden glimmering headpiece of the piazza. Even inside, this church was the goldest, shiniest one I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen a lot of churches on this whole Europe thing…But Saint Mark’s was the most glittery of all – spires and mosaics and paintings all in gold from ceiling to floor. The interiors of its several domes were plastered with gold and I think even Jesus’ eyes were gold in a few portraits. It was a pretty amazing sight, especially walking up to the balcony to look out on the shining lagoon and San Marco square dotted with tourists scattered like ants far below. You can also view the famous horses up there – four bronze life-size horses that the Venetians stole from Constantinople when they ransacked it in the Fourth Crusade; and now their copies (real ones protected indoors) sit proudly on the upper balcony of Saint Mark’s Basilica.

So after the Basilica, we took a longer vaporetto ride off the main island and out into the vast lagoon to head for the islands. Murano is the biggest one, where we went first, and is known for its world-famous Venetian glass. There, I dragged Nick into about 10 or 12 glass shops, picking out beads for Mom and wondering at all the beautiful objects I had no idea could even be made from glass. There were entire tiny orchestras of glass people playing instruments, glass balls that could bounce, real-size glass violins and giant birds with thin glass wings. Everything was full of color and frighteningly fragile. Whole chandeliers of pure glass hung in the shops and I was afraid to turn around the whole time. We headed off for another island later, one called Burano, which is known for its lace. This smaller island, what my guidebook called “sleepy,” was as colorful as the glass in Murano. Every building was a different bright shade of purple, green, yellow, blue. It was quieter and seemed to span only a few streets wide. There weren’t too many tourists and even the canals were empty of boats or gondolas. Burano offered us a snack and a peek at its pretty lace, but soon I missed Venice and my bustling own square.

We took the hour-long vaporetto back to the main island with a shrieking school group and landed in time for another night at the pub we’d discovered on Friday. This time though, there was a rock band (with a clarinet even) playing soft Italian rock to the movements of a strange showman who gave a little “performance” as the music played. He looked about thirty, scruffy and bearded, and was building something out of cardboard in the middle of the bar room when we arrived. As I enjoyed the music, I watched as this strange man proceeded to put his cardboard contraption aside then begin slicing fruits with trimming sheers and dropping them into a blender on a chair in the center of the room. All these things he materialized out of nowhere. After mixing a smoothie over the sounds of drums and thumping bass, the man slurped down two mugs full of fruit, spilling all over his shirt and then licking it up from the stains on his shirt and smoothie lingering on his arms….And it wasn’t over yet. He then pulled out the sheers again, and this time a whole old-fashioned shaving kit to go with them, and stood at the back bar shaving his curly beard in the mirror. Weird? I thought so. But we started to ignore his shaving after it lasted over 20 minutes, and turned back to the music – just in time for the man to return (without sideburns) and extract a black turtleneck, white pilot’s jacket, goggles and a bomber hat from his bag…then retrieve the cardboard “airplane” (I now realized it was an airplane) and dance around the room as though flying in the flimsy plane, all in time to the music. So, it appeared, after all this craziness, that the man doing strange things in front of the whole room of people was in fact part of the show – though we didn’t know this for a good half hour. Odd? Yes. But it was funny, and added quite the bizarre element to the band – which was actually entertaining enough even without the crazy bomber pilot in a cardboard plane.

And so for our final day in Venice I said goodbye to our little square and little café and hotel room without hot water or electricity – and we spent the day buying train tickets, visiting one final church, and I climbed the bell tower of San Marco square to look one last time at Venice from above while Nick explored the Civic Museum in search of the wing dedicated to Napoleon. It was a slightly raining last day, fitting with my mood since I didn’t want to leave! Venice was just so cute and so gorgeous, it’s definitely one place I’ll be going back to someday…though I guess I’ve said that about everywhere. Not bad, not bad at all for a 21st birthday.