Highlights-Venice Day 2
The sore throat remained (expected) so I purchased lozenges at a farmacia. I attended Mass at Sant’Alvise church. Our group toured the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica at St. Mark’s Square. I stopped using a physical map to navigate around Venice and relied on my phone’s map app. With 400 bridges (some leading to dead ends), I needed more precise guidance.
Venice Style
If I have to get a grocery cart, I want one like this!
Venice Style2
Venice makes poor style obvious
Venice Style3 Goods Transport
Everything larger than a suitcase gets moved around this way. This man insisted on posing for me. Style has consequences.
Bridge of Sighs?
Only a poet who had never been on it would claim prisoners looked out the window and sighed. You can’t see anything!
Evolution?
All the polite gulls starved to death. Those that remain are menaces.
Hotel Bathroom Design Dilemma1
Where does the bathmat go? At the end or the side? Both get wet.
Hotel Bathroom Design Dilemma2
Can you operate the flow knob to the left and jump out of the way before the cold water flows?
Notable Items
In the Hotel lobby, I asked the concierge if he could send someone to my room to teach me how to make warm air come out of the wall-mounted climate control unit. I was sure I was doing something wrong.
Concierge: Not possible.
That’s an answer that makes you question your hearing and your sanity.
Me: I beg your pardon?
Concierge: You can’t have heat from the unit installed in the room that is designed to produce it.
That was clear. My hearing was not the problem. Next, I wondered, Have I entered an alternate universe?
Off-blog Narrator: Yes, you have: Italy. (cue theme of The Twilight Zone).
That was when I started looking for the camera. I might have been on the Twilight Zone or Candid Camera.
When I asked why, he gave me the standard answer. It’s a law. This was the answer to many why? questions in Italy.
The climate control unit is only permitted to produce cold air, regardless of the temperature. No one is permitted to have heat from the installed unit from Apr-Oct in Italy. The concierge offered to have a portable unit delivered to my room, which I considered strange, but acceptable. I could have heat, but not from the installed device.
This exchange with the concierge made me yearn for spiritual calm. I attended Mass at Sant’Alvise church searching for it. It was my first Mass in Italian, but I’ve attended Mass before, so I knew the key events. Speakers reading Bible passages. Singing. Standing. Sitting. The donation basket. The Eucharist was next (wafer preparation is a dead giveaway). You don’t have to be Italian or a religious scholar to recognize those things. Oh, and copying what the other people do works too. This is why I _never_ sit in the front row.
On the Doge’s Palace tour, we went upstairs and got into line. I thought we were waiting to enter a special exhibit.
As I waited my turn, a staff member came over, took down the barrier tape, and motioned to me and the man next to me to get out of line. Now I’d done it. I asked too many questions about hotel room climate control. The authorities caught wind of it. I was being ejected from the museum!
No. We were being redirected to the male toilets. What a relief!
Later on the tour, we visited the jail cells in the building next to the palace. Just the thing I want to know on every palace tour, “Where are the dungeons?” NOT. If you’ve seen one H\*ll hole of suffering, you’ve seen them all.
On the way through narrow corridors, the guide announced more than once, “We are going to the Bridge of Sighs.” She said that she started doing this because some people would finish the tour and ask, “When will we see the Bridge of Sighs?” That’s enough to make anyone sigh.
In my spare time after the building tours, I visited the Museo Correr. Besides art, it also had an archeological museum (statues, statues without heads or limbs, heads without statues, pedestals that used to have statues, and some big toes).
But wait. There was more! There were decorated bowls, Roman metal things, and books. Eventually, I gave up, and just speed walked through the rooms and didn’t even read the signs. I can appreciate only so many ancient bowls.
Upon return from the group supper, there was a sign in the hotel lobby informing us of a public transportation worker strike 2100 17 May for 48 hours. How would that affect my train to Florence on Tuesday? We don’t know. Just go to the train station and hope for the best. Now that’s a strategy.
The space heater was in my room and worked great. I felt like such a scofflaw. I had heat, regardless of the law. Not only that, but I saw something that looked like a napkin on the carpeted floor next to the bed. I asked at reception what it was for. So your feet don’t get cold getting out of bed at night or in the morning. On a carpeted floor? Don’t ask.