Venezia!

Buena Sera from Venezia. This is our second night at the al convento. It's a very nice refurbished convent, winery and restaurant. I think we are the only guests right now, so it is very quiet here. There are chickens, ducks, geese, owls and a friendly cat roaming the property.

Venice itself is very beautiful, but right now colder than usual. Thank goodness we are from Seattle, because it poured buckets this morning. We toured St. Marks, and it finally cleared up. Still very windy and rainy though. We took a nice but very pricey gondola ride, and had panini with the locals. So far everyone has been very nice, even when I committed a faux pas of taking my espresso to the table. The nice waitresses had a conniption, and made us stand at the bar. ;) Oh well, they were very nice anyway!

St. Marks was amazing. As a matter of fact, it seems that all gazillion (okay, 80) churches are very nice. We even met some nice priests from Wisconsin at the museum. It was their first visit, too.

Tonight we ate at the restaurant here at the winery. We walked in, and every head turned to stare at us. I smiled and managed a weak "Buena Sera," and the nice owner of the winery gave us a table. The restaurant is filled with locals. They all tried to look sideways at us, but eventually got bored and moved on.

At first, I thought it was weird that no one would come and take our order. Armed with my phrase book, I was mildly confident that I could at least order us some soup. Eventually a young woman hurried in the door. Turns out she must be the owners granddaughter or something. She rushed to us and said "I speak English!" Ah, now we understood. She kind of explained what the options were for dinner, and we ordered anything she suggested. It was all delicious and she told us they made the cured meats and cheeses themselves. After we received our food, she put on her coat and left! Ha. Anyway, I managed to ask for the bill, and the owner knocked ten euros off of our hotel bill. 75 euro a night room! Heck yes.

Speaking of the room, it's huge and clean. Thanks for the suggestion Anna-Leena.

We are traveling to Rome tomorrow. Wohoo!