Venice

We sailed into Venice today. It's always wonderful to sail into Venice skirting places I have heard about my entire life...The Doges Palace--St. Mark's Square--the Bridge of Sighs--the Campanile--Murano--the Rialto Bridge...they are all here within a few miles of each other. It's a thrill!

As like the last time I was here, it was a gray, rainy day. No matter, when in Venice you need to explore. So some exploring was done, we took a Princess shuttle boat to the vaporetto station by the Doges Palace and bought a one hour pass. We sailed on the 4.1 line to Murano to look at some glass. It took 45 minutes to get to Murano, and by the time we got there, the glass blowing was done for the day. So I did some shopping instead (bought a beautiful glass necklace). Then back on another vaporetto (also a 4.1 line) but this time, it took a different route than before. We looked at the map and discovered we were now on the Grand Canal instead of the Giudecca canal and that we were not going anywhere near our shuttle stop. Since no one in our little group speaks Italian and there was no one to ask what to do, we stayed  on the vaporetto when we saw our big ship at the Cruiseport. We got off the vaporetto and discovered the ship was on one side of the canal and we were on the other and there was not a bridge to get across the river.

That's the thing about Venice...there are no streets, only canals, bridges and boats. There are over 100 islands, 400 bridges and lots more boats and right then we needed just one bridge or boat. After trying to get directions from locals, we learned we needed to get back on a vaporetto going the other direction and get off one stop down the line where there was a bridge and a monorail! We bought tickets for the monorail and that's how we crossed the river and made it back to our ship! We were told its important to get lost in Venice. Well, I don't think we were lost, because we could see the Royal Princess, but we did have a learning experience on how to find things. 

We discovered that the locals were pretty helpful, even when they did not speak English and we did not speak Italian. One teenage girl really tried to give us directions but she did not have enough English, but between hand language and smiles, she and I had a little conversation that pointed us in the right direction. Another woman gave use very good directions in Italian that we were able to parse through. Once on the monorail we met a fellow from New Zealand who was following a set of directions on his smartphone that were very helpful. We knew for sure, we were going the right way. We got off the monorail and walked back to the ship. We had had a good adventure. We had a good day.