Venice

We’ve spent the past four days strolling through the winding, mysterious, wonderful streets of Venice. Looking over the canals from bridges. 

Popping in cafes, pasticcerries, and osterias. Eating local Venetian cheese and fresh ricotta cheese from a meat and cheese shop. Strolling the marketplace. Seeking out the secrets hiding behind the walls of silent, narrow alleys away from the beaten path filled with tourists.

  

It’s quite astounding how quickly you can get from totally jam-packed broad streets that you can’t even walk at a normal pace through to totally empty corridors without another person in sight. That drastic of a transition happens in a matter of 10 seconds – you just turn off the main road, and it’s tourist free. Not everywhere, of course; there are some areas where most of the streets are quite touristy. But there huge portions of Venice that a peaceful, mysterious, and delightful.

Whether or not you’ve noticed, you have by now seen hundreds of photos in which this backpack made an appearance:

We have used this light travel daypack just about every day of our 97 days of traveling. There was one day we left it behind at a restaurant; five minutes away, we realized we left it there, and the restaurant was just about to close. We sprinted back, made it in time, and felt overwhelming relief that we hadn’t just lost one of our must valuable items of the trip. Thank you so much, Lorelle, for this truly wonderful gift!

We stumbled upon this modern art park that we were only drawn to go see because a giant metal rhino caught our eye. We walked into the tiny park to see the rhino, and only then did we find that there were a number of other displays there as well. Heavy rocks on rods that teeter very slowly when you push them, a whole arrangement of giant painted turtles, a metal “space knot,” a sculpture that looked like 3D foreign words, etc. The whole exhibit was a gem!

Our very first night in the city turned out to be a wild one.  We don’t have many pictures, but this definitely needs to be in this blog so that we can remember it in the coming years.  A bit of background: our AirBnB host is a Venice tour guide.  He’s right around our age, is originally from The Netherlands, and his name is Jelmer (YELL-mer).  He also ended up being one of the most involved hosts we’ve stayed with on this trip.  Somehow, he knows at least half of the locals in Venice, and seems to spend his days rushing around the city checking in guests at a couple different apartments and then giving them tours around the city.  It was quite a nice introduction to Venice.  Since he works as a tour guide, he knows all sorts of facts about places and sights around the city.  While he was showing us around, he asked if we wanted to go out with him, his friends, and two other AirBnB guests from different rooms.  We looked at each other, shrugged, and said “sure!”

That night, we met Jelmer and guests outside a bar where his friends were playing a small concert.  We stayed and listened for a while, chatting about the prices of drinks, and what it’s like to be a tourist versus a local in a city like Venice.  At one point, Jelmer asked a man sitting near us for a light and began talking to him.  Soon, all of us were talking to this man and his girlfriend.  He came from France, she comes from Poland, and they hadn’t seen each other in eight years (she recently broke up with someone and after that they planned a trip to Venice).  At one point, Jelmer asked our new friend (Clement) if he wanted to come to a party with us.  This made Clement very happy.  He stood up, hugged Jelmer, and shouted something about “The magic of Venice!” So that was that. The two of us, Jelmer, two other AirBnB guests, Clement and his girlfriend Bogna headed off into the night.  One of Jelmer’s friends also came along, but kept getting distracted by people that he knew on the street and quickly fell behind.

At this point, the night started to get a bit surreal.  Clement, who at first seemed quite normal (although a bit rambunctious), turned out to be a bit wilder…and stranger than we’d realized.  He kept making jokes that didn’t make much sense, and alternated between normal conversation and shouting things into the night.  Our favorite moment of the night was when he began to sing.  What was awesome about this was not actually his singing, but the fact that Jelmer immediately joined in.  And man can Jelmer sing.  He literally began opera singing while strolling through the nighttime streets of Venice.  Monisha asked him if he knew any songs from “Marriage of Figarro” or “Barber of Seville,” and he did! The rest of the night was a whirlwind of action with our new pals.  The night ended with slices of take out pizza that really hit the spot.

We’ve seen some awesome dogs in Venice. One was a Czechoslovakian wolf. A real wolf! He was well trained, too. Another day we saw two pups playing together. One was a young Australian shepherd. The other was a tiny little shepherd pup…I don’t know what kind of shepherd, but it was precious. It was also just learning to play; it really wanted to play with the other dog, but was scared. So he would run over, start playing, and then run back to his owner (or to us!) barking, and enjoy some cuddles. 

  

    

One great tip Jelmer gave us was that the Academica Museum is free to the public the first Sunday of every month. He said we should definitely go see it since we would be in Venice that Sunday. We were lucky to have gotten that info; the museum was very enjoyable to visit.

We’ve been trying to adjust our schedule to be closer to home.  We’ve been staying up very late, and trying to sleep in as late as possible each morning.  One night around midnight, we decided we wanted to go out for a couple drinks.  It had been raining all day so we tossed on our rain jackets.  Sure enough, when we walked outside there were puddles.  Monisha got her heel kinda wet in a large one near the doorway, and Nolan got his toes wet a bit further down the road. We were both a bit sad about that since we were both wearing our last pairs of dry and clean socks.  A few streets later, we were stopped in our tracks.  In front of us was the road.  But we couldn’t see the road.  Instead we saw water.  A lot of water.  The entire road was covered in water, and there wasn’t a single dry spot to step.  Since we weren’t planning on going to sleep until 4am, we didn’t really want to head back and just chill in the room for the rest of the evening.  We asked someone in a nearby restaurant if they had any plastic bags.  He gave us four, which we used to make some makeshift rainbooties.  They didn’t work very well.  There were also vendors walking around selling waterproof shoe covers, but they were charging €15. Soon, our feet were totally soaked and we abandoned the plastic bags.  The water was getting deeper too.  It was ankle deep for a few streets, but quickly heading towards Monisha’s knee deep.

The streets weren’t even empty! As crazy as we felt wading through flooded streets of Venice at 1:00am, we weren’t alone. The bar we were heading towards turned out to still be open…the floors flooded with water halfway up our shins. It was such bizarre scene. Almost everywhere else was closed, and although some shops have metal flood protectors that keep water out, the vast majority were just flooding. Some stores were closing, and the people working there were taking everything off the floor or bottom level to put up higher.

The finale of our flooded late night adventure was San Marco Square. The stunning, infamous square was, as you can guess by now, entirely covered in water. It was like a floating city; all the buildings and the church surrounding the square just coming right out of the water. A sight to behold. By this point, we couldn’t stop laughing. It all seemed too absurd. The whole thing felt surreal.

The morning after, all the water was gone.  We realized that if we hadn’t had a desire for late night exploration, we probably would never have even known that Venice had been half covered in water... half of the part that isn’t usually water, that is. Some of you may be wondering: how often does this happen?  We did a bit of research and found that what we had experienced is called “acqua alta” meaning “high water.” Acqua alta happens around four times a year in Venice and is caused when a high tide happens at the same time as a certain wind pattern.  It turns out that rain has little to do with the floods.  It also turns out that the acqua alta we experienced was significantly more “alta” than usual.  Jelmer’s friends who have lived in Venice for more than fifteen years said they’ve never seen water like that!

We’ve been eating very yummy food. Almost all not sit down, main course type meals: takeaway slices of pizza, quick made to order takeout pasta, cichetti (a little like Vetetian tapas; very little sandwiches or slices of baguette topped with meat and cheese, veggies, spreads, cheese and sundried tomato, etc), an Asian Wok noodles place, etc. It’s a great place for food hopping (one of Monisha’s favorite styles of meal), with cichetti places (osterias) everywhere, and so many great takeaway food options. Coffee here is fantastic. Italians know their cappuccinos. And also fairly cheap.

  

  

  

  

Aperol spritz is the drink here. You see it everywhere. Every bar serves it, everyone drinks it. We had never even heard of it before. But of course we had to try one. Nolan quite liked it, but Monisha wasn’t a big fan. Not because of the alcohol (it really doesn’t taste strong at all), but because of the bitterness. The drink is prosecco, sparkling water, and Aperol, which is supposed to be like bitter orange peel flavoring. It’s all chemical, but does have a definite bitter orange peel taste. We also had a Select Spritz, which is very similar, but…instead of Aperol, it’s with Select, which again, is similar. Anyway, they look like this:

Coffee yogurt made its way into just about every day we spent in Venice. Monisha introduced Nolan to this wonderful food in Paris, but we haven’t gotten any since then as most countries don’t seem to have it widely available. Italy apparently likes its coffee yogurt as much as we do!

  

We only had gelato once in Venice. But the gelato place we went to is widely considered one of the two best in the city. They have some specialty flavors, two of which seemed perfectly designed for Nolan’s and my taste. Monisha’s: hazelnut and pistachio with pistachio cream. Nolan’s: dark chocolate and coffee with coffee cream.

We cooked one night, and we were supremely pleased with our meal! Most of the times we’ve cooked on this trip we’ve gone for Italian; we were excited to see that in Italy the Italian meal groceries were on point. So many choices of delicious looking pastas, pizzas, and, what we ended up settling on, gnocchi. We made pumpkin gnocchi with cream pesto sauce, roasted cherry tomatoes, and sautéed onions. Monisha also spied a ball of burrata, which we got as an appetizer. As we enjoyed our meal, we noted that we would be so happy to be served that meal at a restaurant! Another recipe added to the list.

We also wanted to have one last nice sit down Italian dinner. We made a reservation at a canal-side restaurant called Al Timon, known for its STEAK. Monisha chose two cichetti to start us off with. They were excellent, but it was a mistake. When the waiter came, we ordered the specialty, steak for two. They have several options for the cut of steak…we chose one of them. :) As the waiter walked away, he took our cichetti plate, and told us, “Don’t order any more of those. It’s a lot of food.” A minute later, Monisha noted that he didn’t ask how we wanted it cooked. Nolan figured he’d give it to us rare, after all it is a steak place. But Monisha was not going to risk the possibility of being served medium, so she quickly found him and asked about it. He said they usually do medium rare, so she put in our order of rare.

Oh my gosh you should have seen us when we set eyes on that platter of steak. A beautiful, red, succulent plate loaded with steak. And I mean a lot of steak. Around the steak were fries, pumpkin, leeks, mushrooms, red pepper, cooked pineapple, and sauces. What a feast it was. If you are a steak lover in Venice, boy do we have a recommendation for you.