Sunday, July 06, 2008

The City of Romance

Venice was a wonderful surprise that Alex prepared to celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary. Let's be honest, Venice would have been a normal holiday destination instead of an occasion if we had not been expecting our greatest achievement yet. We now realise that we'd better hurry to complete our list of places to see before the little one is here. Remaining in the list is now only Florence and the Tuscany region (Italy) and long destinations such as Egypt, Japan, California and Mexico. Mind you, Pépi and Mémie (Kitem) would be too happy to get the kids while we travel to these destinations, but I also know from my own childhood that I will want to take the kids with us when they're older, still some way to go. And the last couple of years gave us our fair share of travels and adventures.

The Rialto Bridge

I enjoyed Venice, the 33 degrees when coming from a 17 degree London was a bit too warm for comfort but we ate lots of ice cream to keep the baby cool of course! :P

In the Piazza di San Marco with the Palacio Ducale to the right


Much to our disappointment we could not book the tour of mysteries of the palace, we were here for 4 days and we were told we could join the tour next week. nice. that's what I call planning, surely if a tour outsells then you should have more tours available. But we still enjoyed walking about the place.

As you probably already know, Venice is made up of hundreds of islands all joined up with bridges and where the canals are used as streets for private boats and public service (police, fire, refuse collection and laundry collection from hotels!)

I loved how most houses are not accessible from any roads or streets, people park their boats outside their homes, but I suppose these properties must be accessible from neighbouring buildings. On a few occasions, we saw bridges leading exclusively to a front door and on many occasions, we turned in a street only to find it leading to a canal!

It was a wonderful break. It was my second time in Venice, the first was with Kitem and Mr Garden and Julien, and somehow this time, it was completely different, although I kept good memories, it still felt like a new experience.

10 comments:

Jeannie said...

I know what you mean about wanting to take the kids with you when you travel - we often took ours - it makes for a different holiday altogether than when you go as just adults. But they learn a lot about other cultures even if you don't do a lot of sight seeing. It is better than them seeing only one narrow way of doing things.

I'm going to be going through Mexico in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be spending any time sight seeing but we'll see what sort of pictures I get anyway.

The Zombieslayer said...

Nice pics. I had to translate the temperature because in American temperatures (why we haven't switched over to the Metric is beyond me), 17 degrees is below freezing.

That girl said...

Are you friggin' kidding me?! You are expecting a babby!??

Congratulations!!! I'm so happy for you. I know how much you've wanted one.

I haven't even read your posts yet, I just got here and saw the ultrasound photo!!

Woot. Woot.

Okay, I'm gonna go read the posts now. And again congrats!!
Big hugs to you.

Queen of the Mayhem said...

The pictures are lovely!


Good luck with the baby preparations!

tweetey30 said...

Congrats on the little one Helene. I am so happy for you two. When is he/she due??? I know lots of questions. Now I am working I would love to make baby a blanket.. What colors would you like?? Pink, yellow,blue or or somethign for like either like yellow, green, and white or something like that?? I have the perfect pattern.. I havent been by in a while so this is news to me. I have missed you dearly too. Take care and to be honest do as much walking as you can while pregnant it helps with the contractions at the end. Anyway. Beautiful photo's like usual. I got side tracked.

none said...

Beautiful! Did you know venice is built on millions of wooden beams sunk into the marsh?

I wish you the very best on this newest stage of your life!

tshsmom said...

The one, over-riding thing I've always wanted to know about Venice is: How does it smell? There's got to be a lot of wood rot, mildew, and fishy smells there.

Traveling with the kids is amazing! You see everything through their eyes. ;)

Sweeti said...

Well, Helene you should be somewhere in between getting over morning sickness and just about into heartburn at the drop of a hat.
Hope your feeling well and all is not to crazy for you now. Your trip looked fun, I'd worry about traveling to these different places being pregnant.
My cousin just got back from Turkey, she got Girardia and intestinal worms and was pretty sick. Just be careful.

Jeannie said...

Funny you should mention that you saw Morissey - I read a book about this depressed kid who obsessed about him - yet I had never heard of him and had to look him up to see if he was an actual musician. More than likely, a couple of his songs had to have been played over here but I was never one to match a song to the artist. (It was years before I even matched up the big ones like the Rolling Stones!!! or U2)
I think my kids saw Beck a number of years ago - I couldn't go to that one. I love concerts but don't get to go as often as I'd like. Our city sucks for music so we have to go to Toronto or such for anything really good.

S.M. Elliott said...

Beautiful! And congrats on the expected new arrival.