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Long, looooong overdue: Spring break, Venice

Sorry this has taken so long, I haven't been that busy...just lazy. Regardless, here are the pictures from the first city I visited during spring break, Venice.

It was wonderful to spend a couple days in a place where there were no cars whatsoever. You don't even realize how much you love it until you arrive in Florence and the city is full of Fiats and mopeds and surly pedestrians. We went to the Piazza di San Marco and St. Mark's Basilica, took a gondola ride, and reveled in the leftovers of Venice's Carnavale. After hours of walking the alleyways and bridges, it was heaven to just soak up the sun by a canal with a calzone and a coke and not worry about homework at all. We ate a lot of pizza, too, but it was good pizza. I usually just had a margherita (cheese pizza, tsk tsk) and the last pizza I ate in Italy was made with thick mozzarella and slices of cherry tomatoes.

The souvenir shops were dominated by masks, and it was common to run across shops that were exclusively masks ranging from 15 euro to hundreds. There were also a fair amount of shops that sold Venetian glass jewelry, and others that sold some of the most beautiful leather gloves I've ever seen. There were also shops that sold nothing but delicious gelato, but we're not going to spend any more time talking about the massive amounts of ice cream I consumed while on break. Because it was a looot.

I hope this tides you over until I get my Florence pictures up. I don't have many from there...it was more of a basic big city than Venice, and who wants to take pictures of typical store-lined streets? However, I took about a hundred thousand pictures during our day trip to the Italian coast, so there will be plenty of eye candy from that. Oh, how I miss the Tuscan sun.