Monday 24 September 2018. We sail into Venice. We leave the ship directly into a covered walkway leading into the Italian dockside customs. Then we buy tickets for the local water bus to St Mark's Square. "Will it be flooded?" someone asks. "Well, we have been here five times before and we've never seen it flooded," I say, truthfully but perhaps a little prematurely...
The unmistakeable and familiar sight of the Doges Palace and St Mark's Basilica. The cafes are fairly exclusive here...
The major buildings of the square are covered in posts from earlier visits. I always like a stroll round the arcades. If Miss Franny makes appreciative noises at any shop window it's best to put on a bit of a forced stroll if you know what I mean...
There are a couple of these tiny cafe rooms. The tables all bear a reserved sign.
These are what many come to Venice to see. There are around four hundred gondolas in Venice as opposed to centuries gone by when there were thousands. Before the 20th century many had covered cabins for passengers with windows having shutters with louvred slats - hence Venetian blinds...
You should do this in any large city but especially in Venice. Look up! You will be rewarded many times by many beautiful carvings, statues and architectural features. I was spellbound right up to the moment when we reached the steps up to a bridge over a canal and I tripped up. Ah yes... look up occasionally!
Each time we are in Venice we try to find some place we haven't been before. Usually by finding new routes between major sights but having now been six times, we may have to venture away from these in future! This time we found a free music museum and went inside to look at violins, contrabasses and mandolins from 500 years ago.
We ventured down a couple of dead ends leading to private gates and necessitating U-turns, but inevitably we found ourselves eventually at the Grand Canal.
We have our favourite cafe at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, which does our beloved latte machiatto and always has a tempting selection of hand-made sandwiches. Moreover they profess to understand my attempts to speak Italian and so have earned my undying love at least until some future point when they might say "what was that???"
Ooh! This caught my eye! A guitar made of Murano glass! It has real strings - but were the pickups real pickups or more glass? And I must admit my first thought was not "How much does it cost?" (enough not to display the price ticket) but "How much would it weigh?" I'm not sure I could wear that around my neck for hours on end!
The Rialto Bridge is, with St Mark's Square and the Bridge of Sighs, one of Venice's major attractions. It is the latest of a number of bridges on this site, and dates from 1591. Oh... well done, that young lady on the right... Nice gum bubble!
Looking up! Just at this point there are far too many people pressed against you for you actually to fall over anyway. Keep focussed on the pressure of your pockets and grip on your valuables!
We return to St Marks... Square... Oh... there's water, there's crowds milling about unwilling to paddle. There's crowds paddling. There are police officers herding people onto a far too narrow walkway expecting single-file traffic in each direction. With the unrelenting pressure of people being forced onto each end, idiots in the middle are trying to stop to take photos. I just pointed the camera without even looking at it and clicked as I walked.
"Uno oro!" said a news vendor, throwing his arms up in exasperation at my question that he must have heard a million times. So, one hour at high tide. Nothing to see here, keep moving...
We caught a water bus back well before the crowds would leave us panicking that the next boat would be the last that the ship would wait for. Then a relaxing hour before we gathered on the Promenade Deck on Deck 6 to watch the sail away.
I actually took this from the windows of the dining room as we were eating dinner.
Songs tonight included Creedence Clearwater's classic Bad Moon Rising and Herman's Hermits' sing-a-long favourite I'm Into Something Good.
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