Venice is Nice(r) Than Nice.

dear erik,

how 'bout that title, huh?  just wanted to bring it all full circle with the wordplay.  dazzling.  i'm considering a new career.

we arrived here in venice yesterday evening.  i'm not sure what would inspire someone to build a city ON the water, but it's pretty amazing.  it actually looks exactly like it looks in every movie.  what's weird to me is that the whole city is built on wooden piles - they say that they've petrified from hundreds of years underwater, which seems counter-intuitive.  still - no one's asking me to build a city, so i'm guessing they knew what they were doing.

we took the train from rome yesterday morning.  the first day we arrived in rome we both did big loads of laundry, but then it rained for two days, so it took forever for the clothes to dry.  on the first re-wearing, we discovered that the second a single drop of sweat happens, you immediately smell like a big wet dog.  it's not pretty.  anyway - lugging my suitcase from our apartment to the train station on the metro, you can imagine what a glamorous travelling companion i was.

our plan for today is to walk around the city a bit and go see peggy guggenheim's gallery.  when i was working for penny, someone wanted her to do a one-woman play about peggy guggenheim, so i remember doing lots of research about her.  she was kind of a nutter, but her gallery is supposed to be amazing.  however, it's about 11:00 and since we got back from breakfast we've both been sort of sitting around not accomplishing the 'shower and dress' portion of our day.  i suspect we'll get there eventually.

we haven't seen too much of the city so far.  we arrived yesterday and wandered around for a while trying to find our hotel (it's hilarious - in the reviews for this hotel everyone said "it's a great hotel, but it's really hard to find and the map they give you is totally useless." we found that to be 100% true.  you would think that after a few reviews, the hotel might consider rewriting its map, but, apparently, no.) we also went out and got some dinner and walked around a tiny bit trying to get our bearings. 

anyway - it's crazy here, because the buildings are SO close together.  things that look like a tiny alley are actually streets.  also, the italians seem to be huge fans of re-naming streets every few blocks, so we often look at a map and the part of the street that has the name listed is ten blocks away, and you discover that in actuality that street is named something else on the block you're on.

there are also little bridges everywhere taking you over canals (according to wikipedia, venice is built on 117 small islands - or 118 if you're looking at a different part of the article.  and people wonder why i don't trust wikipedia!) but then you find that under the bridge is a little alley with whatever building you're looking for.  all that being said, i find it hard to get oriented, since there are no open vistas anywhere, and so far i haven't been able to pick out any landmarks that are tall enough to see from different parts of the city.  it's strange to only be able to see the square you're in, and nothing else.

i have managed to get Another F#$^*g Cold in the past few days.  i still hadn't gotten over my cough from the last time i was sick.  i find it doubly frustrating, because in my regular life i've gotten really good about not getting sick.  granted, i work from home, so it's considerably easier to not catch every bug going around, but also, the second i feel a tiny scratch in my throat, i take a day and sleep and drink a thousand gallons of water and eat citrus all day, and it almost always keeps me from getting sick. 

i just couldn't bring myself to do that on this trip (although in paris i ended up having to take almost 2 full days anyway, since i ended up getting really sick).  at any rate, i'm continuing with the hope that happy thoughts will make me well, since i don't want to take one of my days to just lie in bed.  from here on out, we only have about three full days in each city, so i want to get as much as i can out of each day - even if it's just walking around looking at the buildings.

the rest of our time in rome was great.  i feel so lucky that we were able to take so much time in paris and rome.  it really helped me feel (especially in rome) like i had a sense of the city's layout, and how to get around.  megan and i were discussing that feeling when you realize you just come out of a building and know which way to walk, rather than that moment where you stand there saying 'okay - if i'm here, and that street is to my left, i'll need to cross the street and go left so i can get to that spot...'  it's a very nice feeling.

i'll try to post some pictures today or tomorrow.  as i said, a lot of the places in rome didn't allow pictures (jeez - just 'cos it's a piece of fabric that's two thousand years old, that's no reason not to let me use my flash...) and honestly, most of the pictures i did take kind of annoy me, simply because they're Exactly The Same Pictures that every other tourist on the planet takes at those spots.  still - i'll try and find something.  and, even if they are predictable, the places themselves are so amazing, the bourgeois nature of the shots can hopefully be overlooked.  :o)

sending lots of love to all!