Here I am in Bremen.... this was in the city center...an old church. That night we just walked around and marveled at all the shops and all the variety of stuff. We had Chinese/Thai take-away for dinner. It was great because they actually had tofu on the menu, and it was delicious. (If you can't guess, the Chinese places in Riga don't have tofu on the menu.) I was pretty sick on this first day of our trip, so we stopped in a pharmacy and got me some drugs. I think I passed out in bed that night around, um, 7 or 8. And yes, I slept through the night. Very normal for the day after the last day of school though as well. :)
Here is Joel by a cool fountain in Bremen.
And we just couldn't pass up this picture. It was a gallery of some sort...I think it must have been that the artists name was Schmuck...but, it was just a photo op not to miss. :)
And here I am in Venice. This was the first big bridge we came to. Had to take the pic!
And here is the first picture of Joel on a bridge! :)
And here we are together!!! Gotta love the self-shot. We did a few of these, cause asking people to take pics of us was just too annoying. Also, just so you know, we walked without a map. Our purpose was to stay off the beaten path, and just find our way. It worked marvelously. We walked down so many tiny little walkways, through lots of areas that were obviously just residential streets...and we still found our way to all the big sights as well.
Here is me in front of St. Marc's catherdral. No, we did not go in... the line was about a mile long. And some girl at our camping place told us that she had stood in line for 3 hours to get in. Yeah, glad we didn't waste so much of the little time we had doing that. I'm sure it's fabulous on the inside, it was beautiful on the outside too.
You can see in this next picture that many of the buildings themselves were very dilapidated. I can imagine that trying to remodel or do external renovations would be very hard...there is no place to put scaffolding! But, even if the buildings are old and worn they have character, added to by the fact that almost all windows had window boxes full of big bright flowers and plants! Here is a great example.
This reminded me of China, but was cuter... they hang all their laundry in the air between buildings. This little alley had an adundance of laundry. Some of it was in snatching distance! :)
Here is the most famous of Venice bridges which crosses the grand canal, the Rialto.
Ah, now here we are at our "resort". It was actually called a camping place, as you'll see later. It was a pretty big place and had many kinds of accomodations. There were tents with cots, little trailers with two twin beds, a little bedside table, and a closet and a bathroom. There were bigger trailers that had more beds and I think an eating area. And there were cabanas. I have to admit, I wasn't overly impressed with our little trailer at first, but, it turned out to be great. The beds were easy to push together (get your mind out of the gutter, it was just more comfy for sleeping!), and it had air conditioning for cooling off after being in the sun all day. And I guess the fact that there certainly wasn't any tv was a good thing because it means we didn't spend any more time in there than we needed to. Anyway... the place was about a 20 min private (but cheap!) shuttle bus ride from Venice. But it had a nice pool (pictured below), a restaurant, a bar, a take-away food joint and a market. It was very nice.
Here I am reading by the pool on our third day there. This day we decided to hang out by the pool in the morning/early afternoon, and head into Venice later. Yes, I am several shades of red/pink from this laying by the pool...but it was awesome. :) I read two books on our five day trip, mostly pool side. Awesome.
This was Joel's favorite place. There were two hot tubs by the pool. But, Joel was telling me that in Oz hot tubs are called spas. In this case, I'll call it a spa, because truth be told, the water wasn't hot at all. But after 30C heat all day, it was nice to get into cooler water with bubbles. But Joel spent so much time in there that he got a silly burn just on the top of his shoulders/arms and top of his chest. His tummy is still white. :)
Here we are on our second day in town, doing another self-shot, with the Rialto bridge in the background.
Back in St. Marc's square, a picture with me and all the pigeons. You could buy seeds and feed them. Did I? NO! They are like dirty flying rats. Ew. Surpsingly, for as many pigeons as there were, there was little pigeon poo. We wondered if they were trained to do it elsewhere. :)
We went up to the top of the bell tower in St. Marc's square to get a "from up on top" view of Venice. It was amazing. All the buildings are so close together. You can't tell where there are walk-ways and where there are canals. The buildings all just look like they are squeezed one next to the other.
Here is a shot that shows really well how they make use of the space. The buildings literally go to the edge of the islands.
Ok, someone saw us trying to do a self-shot, and offered to take the pic. Here we are with Venice in the background.
The last thing we did in Venice was go on a gondola ride. It was something we'd been pondering for days, whether to do it or not, because it was quite expensive. But, as we were heading to the shuttle bus after our last dinner, we decided, what the hell...gotta do it. So here we are in the gondola. The gondolier (a cute one at that! Thanks Joel!) took this pic.
And here is the pic the gondolier insisted on himself. Thanks gondolier! How cute are we??? So romantic!
Since we took this ride at night, not many good shots were possible...but here's one that turned out ok.
As we were saying goodbye, we decided to take a couple of shot of our "resort".
From there, we left Italy, and headed back to Bremen for a night. That afternoon we found a vegetarian store, and I was able to stock up on some veggie products that you can't get in Riga. Whoo hoo!!! :) We also had tex-mex for dinner, and guess what, it was actually somewhat spicy! Yes!!!
It was, by far the best birthday present ever. See the next post for a little more blabber on the subject. :)
Thanks Joel!!!
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