Day 4 - Venice

It's lunchtime and Silvia's mother already prepared lunch for us. (She left for work at 7, came home on our lunchbreak and made lunch, then left to go back to work. She is amazing.) Last night was fantastic, we ate homemade pizza with homemade tomato sauce and chatted for hours with Silvia's parents and friend, Lele. Poor Silvia had to work double-time to do the translation back and forth, and at some points I think everyone wished we could just all speak the same language! You sort of feel dumb that you can't understand someone who is absolutely smart and intelligent...and you know they feel the same way. But after a while, you kind of get what they are saying by watching their eyes and gestures and tone...although sometimes you can get it totally wrong. (i.e. the Ticky, Tocky Balocky comment I mentioned earlier.)

We went to bed around 11:30 and slept sooo well...didn't stir until 8:30. Took showers and went for a walk around a foggy, mystical Venice. It's so neat to take random alleys that lead to different Campos (squares), with beautiful picture opportunities at every corner. We have already taken 250 pictures of our trip plus about 30 minutes of video.

Continuing our tradition of yesterday, we hit some more Cappuchino bars (haha I went to pay for our last round and asked the wrong person so they were about to make 3 more until Silvia corrected me...lol). There are no tourists in the early morning. Lele works security at the airport and says he sees no Americans coming to Italy. Even flights to NYC are full of Italians and barely any Americans. I like that because I don't really want to see anyone else that is speaking American English but from an economy perspective, it is not very good for Venice. They rely on tourists.

Silvia took us to a cute shop to buy some Venetian glass souveniers...real Italian glass made in Italy, not the Made in China crap that a lot of places sell. Terrible, eh? But we have become pretty saavy at spotting the touristy places from the honest storekeepers who want to offer a real experience.

Oh, forgot to tell you the pizzas last night...one was Mushroom and Mozzerella (fresh mozz that comes in a plastic pouch) and the other was Speck and Gorgonzola plus a little Mozzerella. Speck is more smoky than Prosciuotto (sorry for the spelling in the blog, I am not able to spell check on this italian computer).

Ok, Silvia says that I better go eat lunch! Ciao!