6/19 - Venice Day 1

13 hours of sleep later, I felt MUCH better. It's almost 8am.  Next stop, breakfast and coffee. The restaurant was on top of the hotel and had a breathtaking view of the grand canal.

We sat outside to enjoy the view. I brought out a plate of pastries and went inside for my omelet. Heading back to the table, I saw Girard shooing away fat little sparrows. Apparently they've helped themselves to my plate of pastries while I was otherwise engaged.

I got a replacement and sat to enjoy my scrumptious breakfast and the view with a nice cup of coffee. Ahhh la dolce vita...

My fabulous omelet maker!!!

We decided to make today a “let's get as lost as possible” day. As the guide book said, no matter how lost you get, you're still on the island. The canals and narrow alleys were exactly what I had seen in photos and always imagined Venice would be like.

We tried to find the least populated alleyways and happened upon the Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa. We found that we could buy a combo ticket for this exhibit and the Academia which we were planning on visiting the next day. Perfect! The Palazzo Grimani had some Renaissance period paintings (my favorite) and a temporary exhibit of old sketches of Venice.  Since we weren't allowed to takes of the paintings, we settled on goofy pics of each other.

We had a leisurely browse through the exhibit and proceeded to get lost again.  We passed a Hello Kitty store so I took this pic for my friend Michele Mai's daughter Georgie.

Georgie, this is for you!!!

We zigzagged northeast and ended up at the water taxi stop Celestia, deciding to walk along the marina deck only to find a dead end.  Ooookay, the long way around it is!

Circling back, food beckoned and we stopped at the Trattoria Del Vecio Soueri where I had a caprese salad. Fresh mozarellaaaaa...mmmm....

According to the locals and the guide book, the tap water in Venice is known for its purity and taste as it's fed from the Alps. There are beautiful public fountains where people stopped to fill their water bottles.

Along our walk, there were various posters advertising both a Picasso show at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, a Dali exhibit at the Museo S. Apollonia and also a Guggeneheim museum. All got added to our itinerary for the next day. We made our way back towards St. Mark's square to chill at the hotel before dinner. It'd been pretty hot and humid so a nice cool room and shower was looking pretty darn good. We had been walking starting around 9am and it was closing on 5pm. We agreed to meet up around 6pm for dinner.

Again, we set off away in a random direction away from the mass of tourists. The only thing we knew was we wanted pizza. A few alley turns later, we found Trattoria Antica Sacrestia which had an entire menu of pizza. *drool*  It was not yet 6:30 and we were literally the first customers to get seated. The manager was very incredibly friendly and recommended the house seafood pizza. It came with shrimp, scallops, clams and calamari. I asked them to hold the tomato sauce and mussels. The end result was this:

Oh....my....god it was insane! The crust was perfectly thin and chewy. It even held up again the sauce from the seafood and stayed nice and chewy until the very end. Girard ordered a pepperoni pizza. Our meal ended with complimentary Italian cookies and a flute of a lime flavored milk'ish drink. I took a taste and promptly downed the rest. A few minutes later I was feeling warm...wait...did this thing have alcohol? I was sure of it. My stomach burned and I was definitely buzzing. The manager came over and he smilingly told us the drink was made up of lime ice cream and vodka. AHA! I knew it! It was the first time I drank something having no idea it contained alcohol it was that good.

We left the restaurant around 8pm and decided to take another walk, heading towards the Academia to see where it was for tomorrow. We passed the location for the Picasso exhibit and found the Academia just across the bridge. We then saw signs for the Guggenheim so kept going to find it as well. I was pretty tired and my feet were protesting all this exercise so we decided to head back to check out St. Mark's at night then back to the hotel. Note to self: when you're tired and it's late, don't try to find random roads as it just might extend your walk by about a mile. The upside is that our random meandering led us to a modern museum at Punta Della Dogana and marked that for a return visit as well.  We passed some....interesting shops...on the way back.

The sight of the hotel would have sent my feet into a happy dance had they had the energy.