Or at least with us it will. Everyone has rough days on vaca occasionally, especially in a long one, it just goes with the territory. And sometimes it's good to get them out of the way early. Apparently that's what we did yesterday. While getting ready, we tried to plug in my hairdryer, with the converter mind you. It sparked & blew the power. Power came back. We thought we'd done something wrong, so we checked all of the settings & tried again. It sparked & blew the power again. This time it didn't come back on & Chris had to go down to the desk & have them fix it. Sounds like it's not a rare occurrence 'round here. We didn't try again & I let my hair air dry. Oh the humanity! Somehow, I lived.
We finally set out in our day a tad later than we'd hoped. We took the craziest long circuitous path to get to St. Mark's square, so by the time we got there I was just the tiniest bit frustrated. Now, you know when you're even the tiniest bit frustrated, even the smallest things get you worked up? Well even Chris was getting annoyed at the lollygagers! Seriously people, we gave an agenda here, get out of our way! I'm all about the wandering with no agenda...when that's your agenda. It wasn't ours. And, it was Sunday in Italy. All the locals were out doing their local thing, getting in the way of tourism. We finally got to the TI, found out they were of NO help to us, and headed to the vaporetto (water bus) stop. As we walked, I got grumpy. I'd mentioned to chris we should get a snack. I think he's started only listening to half of what I say. I felt like he blew me off, & he didn't hear me. By this time, I'm getting hungry, and there's nowhere to get anything.
So, we head to the vaporetto where we buy 7 day passes, but we have to pay cash & now we're down to only 20€. I saw an ATM the night before & suggested we get money, but Chris said we were fine. Now we only had a few minutes before our boat, no ATM in sight & no food to be found (besides ice cream) & a 40 minute boat ride ahead of us. I was a grump. We were doing the Rick Steve's lagoon tour & decided for sanity's sake to skip the first stop, the cemetery. So it was on to Murano where they do the glass blowing. Glass isn't actually made in Venice proper, hasn't been for a very long time fir fear of fire. Guess they were OK with fire there. So all was well. Not so fast. We still had little money, a hungry Jamie, and less than half of the restaurants take cards. To top it off, we got off on the wrong "bus" stop.
Chris had fun trying to find out where the ATM was from non-english speaking shopkeeps. Finally, he figured it out and we walked over. Fortunatley, it was the street we wanted to be on, so after lunch at a decent little restaurant out on a little square facing a canal, we had lunch. It was good, but we were ready to move on, so we started walking down the main street of Murano. Basically, all it is is shop after shop of glass. Mostly cheap crap next to even cheaper crap, but every once in a while there was a nice place in the mix. We stopped in a few, bought a few Christmas ornaments and a couple of rings for me. We wanted to see a glass-blowing demonstration, but after stopping into a sleazy place, we finally talked to a guy in a really nice on who said on Sundays it's hard to see because they only do it in the morning, and even then it's difficult. Add that to your book, Rick Steve's! But, at least we'd both seen it before, so we weren't that disappointed.
Throughout the city, they have these cool class sculptures that one of the glass houses has made. There was one rightr by where we ate lunch, so we started seeking them out. Very neat. It was obvious that some of the places were there for the tourist $$, but hated the tourists at the same time. Kind of a strange situation. We just happened to get to the vaporetto stop a few minutes before the boat to Burano, so soon we were off to another island.
Burano is famous for it's white lace and colorful houses. We couldn't give a hoot about lace, so we walked though the island/town looking at the beautiful scenery around us. We noticed on Murano that I was working a big blister, and after resting for so long between islands (40 mins) I was hurting for certain, but better to just go see it than give up. The island is quaint with curtains over the doors to block the sun (I guess) and lots of boats. It even has a church that leans like the one in Pisa. We stopped into a bakery and got cookies. I think they were like linzer cookies? Apricot jelly sandwiched between two amazing cookies w/a cutout in one of them. Yeah, that's pretty much the whole of Burano. Sat waterside drinking beer & eating pizza watching all the locals come back in from a day of boating while we waited for our boat. I was totally jealous and wished I knew someone to take us out.
So, the boat ride back. Yeah, that was an experience. We hadn't realized that the timetables actuatlly tell you when the boat leaves, not when it arrives, so we almost missed ours. And, it was a ferry, so it was huge. And it stopped and we had to change boats at some other place. It was crazy! Thank goodness for the guy who came through and told everyone! The reboarding was insane, an absolute crush of humanity. I can see how people get trampled in a crowd!
We made it back...finally. On the way back to our hotel, we did a Rick Steve's walking tour. Figured we might as well, since it was on our way and everything. On it, we ran across our fave pizza stand. Yay! So yummy! We came back to the hotel and got ready for dinner. Yeah, dinner. Chris picked out a couple of places in Rick Steve's book. First, he didn't bring the book and couldn't remember the directions, so we had to come back & get it (he's seriously directionally challenged). Then, we still couldn't find it. Yes, Rick gives directions, but they're not always the best, and here, directions can be challenging at best. So, after circling the same square several times, we finally thought we found one of them. But when we got our menus, I realized it wasn't the place.
And everything went downhill from there. It was some of the worst food we'd ever had. In our lives. Seriously, Olive Garden would have been better! Chris had cuttlefish (black ink squid?) and I had veal. His was inedible and mine was like a Lean Cuisine meal. Literally. Blech! Not only was the food bad, but the waiters seemed to genuinely hate their job. We couldn't wait to get out of that place! Afterwards, we took one last stab at finding the restaurants we'd been looking for just to see, and it turns out we'd walked by one; it was closed. On our way back to our hotel, we had gelato to tide us over and rehashed the horrible experience we'd just had.
The day wasn't bad, per-se. We saw some cool things, but it wasn't perfect. In all honesty, if I'd had a better attitude, that would have helped! Here's to tomorrow!
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