Gondolas and gelato

The nine hour train ride was worth it. For a city that's sinking, it sure is grand. Its very strange to me that there are moss coered doorsteps to houses with opulent chandeliers in them. Our 'hotel' was pretty miserable. We had a private room, but the whole place smelled like morning breath and the enterance was on an ally that was used as the delivery door for the nice hotels across the way.
Venice is a beautiful place, filled with winding allies (there are house numbers but they don't work like they do in the US. Instead of each street getting a set of numbers, Veince uses 1-6000 and none are repeated.), and canal bridges. The Rialto Bridge and San Marco's are really well marked so we never got lost, but we sure lost out sense of direction. We slept like logs and woke up early to explore . Went back to the Rialto where Frank bought Tasha a gift (can't say where we went or I'd ruin the surprise!).
In the afternoon we took a water taxi to Murano and watched them do live glass slowing demonstrations. The guy made a unicorn and vase in a matter of moments. I was so impressed that I bought a Christmas ornament that I'm praying won't get broken. Murano was a very sleepy area with nothing to do but wander. Once we tired of that we taxied back to Veince where we walked by the Bridge of SIghs, Dodge's Palace (the line was about 4 hours long so we passed on that), and all of the other Venice buildings that you recognize but don't know the names of. We bought our lunch at a grocery store and ate it while dangling our legs over the water and looking up at the Rialto. Venice had me back on my fruit and nuts diet so it was the 'eat to live' instead of 'live to eat' that I'm so used to!
We siestaed for a while and then hit the town again. We wandered through the oldest Jewish ghetto in the world (ghetto means foundry) while Joe quietly sang the Adam Sandler Jewish song to us. When it was dark, we made our way over to San Marco's for the deuling string quartets who played amazing jmusic that made us clap our hands and try to dance. We noticed that we were the only people under 50 years old but that nearly everyone was American. We ate several portions of gelato.