April 1

.

Today was kind of an odd day.  We hadn't realized that the day after Easter is a holiday.  Our local fruit/veg market boat was closed, as were groceries, banks and post offices.  We didn't discover this was a holiday until after we got back to the apartment after trying to visit those places, and finding them closed........

It finally stopped raining yesterday afternoon, and didn't rain today, either.  Huzzah!  The sun was even out, off and on, today.

We had thought we might travel the lagoon surrounding Venice a bit (Murano is where they make  glass, and Burano is quaint, with brightly painted houses).  (Apparently boats run, despite the holiday.....)  But when we looked into it, it looked like an hour and a half on a couple of boats, with a stop-over in between.

For unknown reasons I woke up this morning feeling a bit seasick, and the idea of spending that much time on boats was just not appealing.

We decided to pass, and just spend a bit of time wandering in our own neighborhood, at a time when we had no where to hurry to be (no 8:00 am mass, for example).

Some aimless wandering occurred.

There are a ton of churches here, as you might guess, but the only one (1) we've seen that was clearly open, and you could just walk in and look around, was found this afternoon in our neighborhood.  I don't know how old it is (but I took a pic of its sign, outside, so I can look it up), but it has paintings from the 1300s.  You know you're not in Kansas any more when the little neighborhood churches have paintings in them that would be in museums, if those paintings were in the USA......

There was a shrine to Vivaldi in the church.  Apparently his daughter was born on March 4, and it wasn't sure she would survive, so she was whisked to that particular church to be baptized.  There was a woman there, the whole time I was there, arranging flowers in the Vivaldi shrine.  They smelled good.

The woman, the flowers, the neighborhood church -- they seemed *real*.  So much of Venice is "Of the tourists, by the tourists, for the tourists."  I was glad to see a real person, doing something for reasons other than trying to sell something to tourists!

Something else real that we saw a lot of today was laundry hanging outside.  The rain that has been keeping tourists sodden has been preventing Italians from drying their clothes.  I took a lot of pics of laundry in the breeze.  I hope some of them will be interesting enough to show you, in a few weeks.

In the end, we did a lot less walking today.  It was nice to have a "write postcards" kind of day, after so many days when we were exhausted at the end of the day from all the walking.

My daughter told me this morning that we'd walked 5.5 miles yesterday, not including any walking we did up/down/back/forth in the buildings we visited.  That's got to have been at least another .5 miles.  I told her we ought to get credit for 7 miles, given all the stairs............

Tomorrow we hope/expect our fruit/veg boat will be open, as well as the bank and the post office.  We'd like some more of those good strawberries we got a few days ago, and enough cash to buy our tickets to Bologna from a machine.  I read somewhere that if you have to speak to a ticket agent in the Venice train station, it can take forever, and American credit cards don't work in European ticket-selling machines.  We used cash in a machine to buy our boat tickets from the airport to here, and I bet we can use cash to buy train tix from here to Bologna.  If we have enough cash.

And we also need postcard stamps for mailing the above-mentioned postcards!

In other exciting news, I sent my first email from an ipod today.  I've been reading Pride and Predjudice on the ipod.  Kinda odd that a "page" is a screen worth, and when your screen is 2x3"?,  your book has 1800 pages............

And for one final trivia point -- everyone but me probably already knew this, but stuff charges WAY faster on European current than American current.  Given that we only have two of the pluggy-innie things you need to connect an American device to European current, that quick charging is very nice!

Ciao!



In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.

'