Venice Day 2

After a GREAT breakfast (finally some kid-friendly choices and a larger selection of breakfast items, but still the ham/cheese and white buns!) we headed out for the day. To the far right is our family close to San Marco - the lagoon and San Georgio island in the background. Above is one of the amazing mosaics at San Marco - with the sun setting on the gold tiles it was beautiful!

We got talked into visiting a Murano glass factory on Murano Island by the hotel staff. We got a free taxi ride to the island, a free demonstration of how they make the glass items, and a free ride back. Yeah, right...they forgot to mention that the demonstration (which was really cool) was only about 5 minutes, and the majority of the time was spent in their gallery with a salesperson hovering trying to get us to buy something. While the pieces were amazing and I would have LOVED to buy one, we were not going to spend thousands of euros on anything - we resisted the hard sell and went downstairs to the "cheap" room where Sean decided I needed something for mother's day. How can we resist that?? So he picked out two things for me, one of which he couldn't wait for me to open so I did - a beautiful glass beaded bracelet. But is was fun to take the water taxi to an outer island and see parts of Venice that we wouldn't have otherwise seen.

After lunch (sitting outside along the canal - heavenly), we walked to the Rialto Bridge. We had gelato while standing on the bridge and laughed at all of the guys selling knock-off purses/sunglasses running from the police...Sean was very curious about why they were selling these items, what happened if they got caught, why I didn't buy anything from them, etc. We then went up the San Marco bell tower and had glorious views of the area. And then the bells rang...wow was that loud! I didn't think they would let anyone up there when the bells were ringing, but I was wrong! We had a light dinner in our hotel and got ready to head back "home" to London. We were ready to go back to London...11 days of traveling is too long!