Girls' Weekend in Venice, or A Post Guaranteed to Make Julia Green with Envy

Tyler went to the US for nearly two weeks in January. To forestall myself from staying in the apartment alone the entire time, I scheduled a weekend trip in the middle of his absence--to Venice! The trip was my friend Katie's brainchild--I wouldn't have had the energy to make it happen without her gentle prodding--and our friend Mirjam came along, too.

This is the neighborhood where we stayed:

Ooh!

Aah!

This palace is right next to the vaporetto (water bus) stop nearest our apartment.



We saw intricate stonework with surprising details like this all over the city.

Notice two pairs of lions, one supporting and one perched on this balcony.

Not pictured, but among the best features of our location: Grom, Tyler's and my favorite gelateria in Europe (and probably in the world), has a shop just around the corner.

Most of what we did in the nearly three days we were there was walk around and gawk at the exteriors of things. This is clearly the most important thing to do in Venice, since the canals are on the exteriors of things. (Most of the time. Luckily, there was no flooding while we were there.) But, since we had Katie with us, and Katie is both inquisitive and brave, we got to see some impressive interiors, too. Most notably this one:





That's the Hotel Danieli, where the three of us all aspire to stay one day when we're rich and famous. We stumbled upon it while walking through the nearly empty city on Friday night. It was built in the 14th century, during the days of the glory of the Republic of Venice, and it really shows why they call these buildings "palazzi." In January, the lowest point of the low season, it costs 300 euros a night to stay in the Danieli's simplest room. (Which is still beautiful. Again thanks to Katie, we got to see one.) In May, it's more than twice that.

Saturday dawned clear and gorgeous. We set out (many hours after the dawn) by vaporetto on the Grand Canal.

The boat heading toward the camera is a vaporetto.

Mirjam and Katie on the boat.

Stripy poles in the Grand Canal.

I was shocked by the beautiful blue-green color of the water. I was expecting brown. But of course, this water does come from the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean doesn't do brown.

Very proud of this picture. The church is called San Salute.

Gondolas and San Salute, another of my best photographic efforts.

At the end of the Grand Canal: St. Mark's Square, the drawing room of all Europe!



I LOVED St. Mark's. It is the best major church I've seen, hands down. Unique roofline, excellent state of repair, extremely high level of fanciness on both the outside and inside. When I go back to Venice I will pay to take the tour, to climb the terrace, and to go into the apse. This time I contented myself with taking the free walk-through at a glacial pace.





The interior is covered with golden mosaics in styles spanning several centuries. The floor is tessellated marble in endlessly varying patterns. The floor is also notable for its extreme unevenness--it's a series of hills and valleys. I guess that's what happens when you put a building that heavy in a swamp.

Astronomical clock in St. Mark's Square.

Gates to the campanile, sadly closed due to December's flooding.

I had to get pictures from all sides.

When I could tear myself away from St. Mark's (Katie and Mirjam were very patient with me) we went to get a look at the Bridge of Sighs.



Then we boarded another vaporetto to cross to...



San Giorgio Maggiore!



The most important thing about San Giorgio is that it has a tower to climb and is perfectly located for views from that tower. A very nice thing about this particular tower, especially if you're seven months pregnant, is that you don't actually have to climb it--there's an elevator! Unprecedented!

Western view

St. Mark's Square from San Giorgio

It was very cold up in the tower. Pretty soon we crossed back over to go in search of lunch. On the way (on the previously unphotographed side of of St. Mark's) I found a friend.



After eating and wandering a bit more we crossed the Grand Canal to go to the Guggenheim Collection. The collection, most of which was purchased by Peggy Guggenheim herself, is housed in her home. One of the museum's best features is her eclectic sculpture garden, where she is buried alongside her 14 Lhasa Apso dogs.

The dog's marker is a bit hard to read. At the top it says, "Here lie my beloved babies." Though many of the dogs had excellent names, my favorite is probably Sir Herbert.

On Sunday we headed out to see some of the other islands in the lagoon. We had to wander a while to find the vaporetto stop, so we saw a bit of a neighborhood we hadn't been to before. There were several teams of rowers out on the canals in matching outfits, yet they didn't look especially practiced--we saw several people nearly lose their balance and fall in.



Our first stop on our trip out into the lagoon was the cemetery island. It was converted into a cemetery during Napoleonic rule of Venice. Napoleon may have been the loathed conqueror of the proud Republic of Venice, but at least he had the sense to recognize that the Venetians' practice of burying their dead on the tiny islands where they lived was highly unsanitary. We saw the graves of lots of Venetians with pretty names and also of two famous people: Sergei Diaghilev (whose grave was adorned with ballet shoe offerings) and Igor Stravinsky.

View from the cemetery vaporetto stop. Pictures weren't allowed inside. Murano is in the background.

Once we found our way out of the maze of graves we caught a boat to Murano. This was my least favorite of the islands. We walked down the main canal from one boat stop to another and saw essentially nothing but glass shops. The buildings were neither as grand as those in Venice itself nor are cute as those on Burano. If you want to find the nicest glass stuff (some of the wares we saw in shop windows were quite remarkable) then Murano is the place to go; otherwise, skip it.

I shouldn't say that glass shops were all there was to see--there was also this charming lighthouse right next to the vaporetto stop from which we departed the island.

Definitely my favorite building on Murano.

Burano, though, was truly worth seeing. It has the feel of a normal little town (at least in January, when it was pretty much free of tourists)--not a wealthy or fancy place, but lived-in and pleasant. What makes it unusual is its wild and crazy paint job.



According to our hostess (who is American, but got her information from her "very Venetian" old lady neighbor) the houses are painted this way because Burano is (was) a fishing village, and the bright colors helped the fisherpersons navigate back to their houses in the thick lagoon fog.

Leaning tower of Burano!

Stoplight houses

We managed to walk around the whole island between one boat departure and the next. I would have gladly stayed longer, but by this time it was wickedly cold, and getting into the heated boat was a welcome respite. We made one last little hop on our outward journey to Torcello, the island "where Venice began," to quote our hostess again. Torcello was first settled in the fifth century, and was for 500 years or so the most populated and richest of the islands. When the water around the island filled up with sediment and turned into a swamp, the people packed up and moved to other islands, primarily Venice. They took down most of the buildings on Torcello so they could reuse the materials, so Torcello today is oddly, almost eerily empty. There are four historic buildings left: two churches and two palaces. We tried to go into the seventh-century Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, but as it was closing soon the mean lady at the ticket counter wouldn't let us have the audio guide. So instead of looking at the Byzantine mosaics we hoofed it back across the island to catch the earlier boat.

Creepy sculpture garden/vineyard

And that was pretty much it. The amazingly good weather finally broke while we were at dinner that night, so we spent just an hour or so walking around in the rain before heading back to the apartment. In the morning we made our way back to Aachen in a series of well coordinated vehicles: vaporetto to shuttle, shuttle to plane, plane to shuttle, home. The tiny size of the airports we flew through (Treviso and Maastricht-Aachen) meant that check-in and baggage claim took almost no time, so the trip was remarkably efficient.

Venice, like Prague, Santorini, and Cinque Terre, was a place that I had seen a lot of pictures of before going there. I'd even seen movies shot there. And yet I still spent the whole trip thinking, "I didn't know it would look like THIS." It's pretty much impossible to make your brain understand how beautiful it will be until you're in the middle of it. Julia: you'll get there. I recommend going in January some year. In the meantime, eat your heart out over this blog post! ;)

Rialto Bridge by night

Epic Deutschland Tour, Part the Last: Bricks, Bodies, Broadcasting

The last two months have been very busy for us, what with Tyler's job applications, my final project for my master's, and thinking about all things pregnancy- and baby-related. So busy, in fact, that I don't feel too bad about finishing up this series of blog posts nearly two months after our return from our trip. I'm still in the throes of my project, but Tyler has promised to take over blogging responsibilities until it's done so that we can (hopefully) start posting more than once a month again.

This post is all about the free cities of the Hanseatic League: Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen. The Hansestädte (Hansa cities), as they are called, were capitals of trade in the 13th to 17th centuries or so. Obviously, this made them very wealthy. Unfortunately, the historic wealth of Bremen and Hamburg isn't so easy to see, because both were bombed extensively in WWII. Lübeck, however, is very well preserved.

So, on to Lübeck! Feeling a bit rested after our two nights in Berlin, we made the most of our three or so hours in Lübeck by walking all over the old city and taking lots of pictures (as is our wont). It's full of beautiful buildings, in a style unlike any we'd seen before, about half of which are leaning dangerously. Like this iconic city gate:

The Holsten (formerly Holstein) Gate, minted on 50 DM bills until 1991 and on the 2 Euro coin in 2006. Without us, of course.

And the towers of this massive church:

I know you can't tell from this picture, but these towers actually lean forward quite alarmingly. I felt a little nervous walking under them.

Lübeck's Rathaus is perhaps the coolest we saw on our trip. It's huge, with tons of interesting detail. It's impossible to capture in one picture because it looks quite different from different angles.

Long front view

Front detail view

Rear view

We found Lübeck's streets very photogenic.





Here's another cool city gate:



And another interesting church:



And a guild hall:



The old city center is on an island near the mouth of the Trave River. As we were heading back to the bus we saw these pretty boats.



Our next stop was Hamburg. Since our return I've learned that Hamburg is a prime destination for German teens. The kids in my Sunday School class were quite jealous that we'd been, which surprised me, because Hamburg was one of my least favorite stops on the tour.

We took two more tours of modern German industry while we were there. The first was at the Norddeutsche Rundfunk (NDR) television studio. We got to see the studios where their shows are filmed and check out some of the technology. Here we are on TV! Well, in front of the blue screen, anyway. But I think this proves that we should be on TV, because we look pretty darn cute.

Courtesy of Claudia

And this is Tyler pretending to be a light-control pro:



After the tour we had lunch at the studio cafeteria, which was unexpectedly excellent because they had an extensive salad bar. We were DYING for fresh, non-German food at this point.

The other tour ... well, let's just say I slept through most of it. Sitting at a table, surrounded by friends, in broad daylight. It was a harbor tour, which, I admit, sounds pretty cool. But our tour guide appeared to be mostly interested in talking about shipping statistics. We got a couple of nice pictures, anyway. Or rather, Tyler did. I was napping.

Tall ship

Hamburg from the water

After the tour we walked around a tiny bit and did some shopping. Hamburg is big, we didn't know where to find cool stuff to look at, and we were too toured-out to make much of an effort. We had another delicious meal from an unexpected source: an Indian restaurant in a mall's food court. It tasted like real Indian food, which is all any Indian restaurant in Germany needs to do to utterly thrill me.

Hamburg Rathaus

We stayed in Hamburg two nights and saw two very different kinds of shows. The first was a synchronized light, water, and music show in a big park.

Though this looks a bit like the aurora borealis, it's actually just very tall, illuminated jets of water. Still pretty cool. Courtesy of Sarah.

The second event was a show of Cuban music and dance by some (apparently) famous and (obviously) ancient performers. The music and dancing were good, but the smarmy narration by an obnoxious man with absolutely the worst Spanish accent I have ever heard in my life was bizarre and, well, obnoxious. Plus, the theater was sweltering and I was cranky.

And finally, Bremen. We only had a few hours in Bremen, but we had some great recommendations from our friends Leif and Xylar. We tried to take a tour of the lovely Rathaus, but sadly, we were denied--it was being prepared for a week-long festival that started after we left.



We found the Bremen town musicians...



...and the Bremen town centaur-merman dude.



Then we went around through a back courtyard of the cathedral and into the Bleikeller (lead cellar). This was one of the highlights in weirdness of the trip. This sign was the highlight of poor yet hilarious English of the trip:



I'm not clear on the details, but for some reason a few corpses were stored in this cellar over the centuries. And for some reason there was a very high concentration of lead in this cellar, which caused the bodies to mummify in a totally freaky way:



Finally, we went into the cathedral itself. It has some lovely painted details.



And that was pretty much it for our Epic Deutschland tour. After Bremen we drove to Münster, where we spent our final night. Münster is famous for its many churches, and we saw a bunch on our walk to dinner that night, but it was raining so we didn't spend much time looking. Our last group dinner was at a restaurant most memorable for its name. In fact, we think this restaurant may have given us our baby's name: Pinkus Müller. If it's a girl, we can call her Pinkie.

THE END.