I have directions, I had directions, but you lost them!

Don't worry about the title of this post, it makes about as much sense as the day we had, but I thought that made it a fitting title.

So, we're bad tourists and have this habit of just wandering around and not seeing what we're really supposed to see (actually, I think that this makes us great adventurers, but other people might not agree with our travel planning/philosophy) and that was our plan for today. Our first (and our only designated) destination was Campo Santa Margherita, which was just supposed to be a fun little area that we thought would be a nice way to start our day.

Note: We'd originally planned on going to visit the Galleria dell'Academia because that is the home of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man until we realized that they don't actually display it there, they just have it. Since that is totally lame and we are totally broke, we decided to walk by the Galleria, but not go in. Campo Santa Margherita, it was!

We got directions, but we also have a nasty habit of ignoring directions, so we got lost. I'd been told that I needed to get lost in Venice and we haven't had any trouble with that, but today, we got really lost. We ended up somewhere that had cars! I kid you not and Venice doesn't have cars! I still don't know where we were. We couldn't even find a sign to tell us where we were at that point, but we knew it was not where we wanted to be.

Wherever this place was, however, had signs directing people towards San Marco and we had a map and a general idea of where that was in relation to where we wanted to go, so we set off following those signs. This would also be the part of the day where I took out my iPod and used the compass app to guide us (southeast). Yup. Whitney thought that the compass was archaic, but I told her that we couldn't follow the North Star at 10am, so the compass was our best option. With a combination of map/sign reading, helpful landmarks and my compass, we finally made it to our destination. It only took us an hour and 20 minutes.

Victory!

I think we were a little disappointed when we got there; the book had made it sound like a lot of hustle and bustle and it was neither. The highlight of our excursion there was getting to see "The House of the Moor." Apparently researchers have found that Shakespeare's Othello was based on Cristoforo Moro, the son of a noble family who was sent to govern the island of Cyrpus in 1508 -- where this research was back in March when I was teaching Othello to a bunch of uninterested tenth graders, I'll never know. It was just a house, we couldn't go in or anything; they didn't even have a sign so all we have to rely on is that the information in the book is accurate, but I will be telling my classes about this if I ever teach Othello again.

Well class, Othello wrote Othello... long story

We decided that we would go back to Rialto Market because it would give us an opportunity to find some lunch (and because we apparently wanted to walk about as far away from where we were as possible without actually leaving Venice). The signage from Campo Santa Margherita to Rialto was a lot better than the non-signage we'd encountered in our first excursion of the day, but I took the iPod out again anyways. During this walk, we also found the famous bridge Ponte dei Pugni, which was the fighting bridge in ye olden Venice. It was where the clans (or gangs) used to meet up to scuffle. The bridge has footprints on it to mark the starting positions but apparently most fights just ended up with everyone falling into the canal.

Of course the hottest part of the day was when we were lost, because things had cooled down significantly by the time we got to Rialto. We found lunch there and then went to look at the gondola ferry (because a real gondola ride costs 80 euros for 50 minutes and we're not about that). It's a ferry, so we knew it wouldn't take us far but we figured we would ask just so we could say we did it if it worked out. When Whit asked the guy where the ferry went, he smoothly replied with "my house." He did not get our money.

We putzed around for a while and found some street performers, at least, we assume that's what they were. We saw them taking bows in the middle of a square with a whole bunch of people applauding them, but then they just turned on some more music and danced around and did about as well as would I do (which is to say badly and like you're participating in an exorcism).

Then it was time for our usual midday break, but before my feet could truly rest (and before I could blog), Whitney got a message from a Pfeiffer Lady Laxer who is also in Venice, so we were back out on the streets. Chalane, Whit's friend, has also been in Paris when we were there but we hadn't been able to connect then, so this was a priority.

Go Falcons!

And now I get to have my real rest time before dinner, which is looking like it is going to be pizza and Bellinis! (All we've had here is carbs and alcohol...haters gunna hate).

Also, tonight in America, Susan is boarding a plane to Rome! And tomorrow, we are going to meet her there!