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OCTOBER 4, 2003
It was a half hour walk to the hostel and the streets were filled with people, especially young people (Padova is a university city). We checked in at the hostel and then went out for a walk back to the shopping area to get some food. It started raining so we went back down to the hostel. We are in a 6-bed dorm which cost only 13.50 euros, including breakfast. Two young women from the UK showed up about 8:30 and we got some good advice on places to stay in Rome and Florence. We decided to go to Verona tomorrow and stay there for a night so we could get information on hiking in the Dolomites.
9/14: There were 5 cancellations for this evening, so the man at reception said the 4 of us could spend another night at the hostel. The UK women had planned to go to Venice today from Verona, so they were happy to stay and so were Shari and I.
Shari and I has breakfast and then we walked to the train station and got the 9AM train to Venice. It was only a half hour train ride, and the first thing we did in Venice was check with tourist information on whether the Glass Museum on the island of Murano was open today. It is closed on Sundays, so we dill visit the 3 islands tomorrow.
Today we took Vaporetti #1 for a 90-minute cruise up the Grand Canal and then we walked all over Venice for about 4.5 hours. It was a great day for walking, sunny but breezy. Venice is built on 117 small islands and has about 150 canals and 400 bridges, but only 3 bridges cross the Grand Canal. The city is divided into 6 sections and there are no cars in the city. All public transport is via the canals and every single item (staples, food, furniture, miscellaneous shop goods) arrives at its destination by water. The gondolas look charming but they are expensive to hire. The vaporettis (passenger boats) or the traghetto (public gondolas) that are used to cross the Grand Canal between bridges are a better form of transport because they are muh cheaper. It was fun to watch the gondolas as they went up the side canals (they usually hold 6 people) and they played music in a few of them as they went by.
It was pretty crowded walking along the Grand Canal but lots of the side streets and squares (campos) were pretty empty. We came across a very unusual street entertainer on one of the side streets. He played music by rubbing his fingertips across the tops of various size and shaped wine glasses that were filled with different levels of water. We lisetned to him play a selection from The Nutcracker, and he was unbelievably good.
We came back to Padova about 3PM and went to a park on the way back to the hostel. Shari read her book and I slept for about an hour, laying on the grass. It was delightful. There were lots of people in the park, walking, sitting, napping, playing cards and just enjoying a beautiful September afternoon.
We got back to the hostel about 5:30, not particularly looking forward to a long evening with nothing much to do. There was a sign on a bulletin board showing a pizza place nearby which supposedly had good, inexpensive pizza, so we walked to the restaurant and each got a pizza. The sign was right on both counts. We brought the pizza back to the hostel and ate in the TV room, which had a good TV with lots of channels, but only one in English. I was tired from a lot of walking, so I just went to bed about 8:30.
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