| Saturday, February 19, 2005 |
| Venice |
There’re pigeons all over the place in St. Mark’s Square, and people selling little packets of birdfeed at their little stalls. Watching children having pigeons stand on their heads and shoulders and in their hands while they (the children!) shriek in delight. Once I saw this person in a hat putting feed deliberately on the hat so that the pigeons would stand on it. At first I thought it was a man; then this person turned slightly and I saw that it was a grandmother! So gungho. Haha.
The gondola rowers were on strike that day. Which was disappointing, but then we took a ride in this wooden boat, and it was fun as well. My hands were freezing like nobody’s business, but I wanted to stay out (the boat has a little cabin for shelter) to take pictures, and anyhow it’s a much better experience. People waved at us from bridges, and this lady in our group would always wave enthusiastically back. Or if they didn’t wave she’d wave first and they’d wave back. This same lady insisted her husband take a picture for her at every bridge, and when he asked her what bridge it was she’d say, “I donno. Just take! Take picture!” Haha. This same lady told us over our last dinner in Switzerland (tasteless and awful for me since I was sick and had a blocked nose – but not very nice for the others too) that her husband would eat everything even if it’s not nice, and that he has “many expectations of food, but they’re all very low”. Lol.
There're often these sticks sticking out of the water in front of doors, painted like those things they put beside barber shops, you know those stripey things. Not all are painted like that though, I saw some painted red so that they looked like giant red candles sticking out of the water.
Venice is beautiful at night. Mesmerising. That was when we had to take a boat back to where our bus was parked. Wow. The sea in the day is very green, like jade green. Not clear, and I think probably not clean either, but I like the colour anyway.
This is a little digression; I like the Chinese restaurants we ate in over there (I mean Italy). Not so much for the food (only one or two were good really) but for the atmosphere? The ‘Chinese-ness’ of it, yet slighty foreign. In my opinion the décor is all overdone, but I like it.
In Venice we saw a leaning clock tower. It was really leaning! |
posted by esther @ 6:53 PM  |
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