First View of Venice

This is Gatwick Airport. They have pretty cool benches but a strange way of tell you your gate number. Usually, your gate number is on your ticket and on departure information screens even before you check in. But at Gatwick, they don't tell you your gate number until like 45 minutes before the gate closes. It tooks 10 minutes alone to walk to the gate. I thought method was a bit strange.

At around 4:30 am on October 7th, when it was still dark out, my trip to Venice began. We planned to give us just over one hour at the airport while many other people in our program planned around two or three hours. So I was a bit nervous about the amount of time we had to go through security, gather ourselves together, and get to the gate in time. It turned out one hour was plenty of time for our flight.


This was pretty much our first view of Venice. Our hotel was on the mainland along this road. In fact, you can see it in this picture. It's the yellowish building right in the middle of the photo. The name is Hotel Primavera. It was actually quite nice little place to stay. There were A/C, single beds for everyone, free breakfast, a really cheap eatery, and clean linens. The front desk receptionists were twins. On the first night when we came back from the island, we thought it was weird that the receptionist who was ever so helpful changed her clothes. I thought she took a shower and was wearing clean clothes but it was also strange that she seemed to be working a 14 hour shift. The next night, we saw the twins standing together. I had quite a good laugh about it.


These are just some random pictures I took while wandering through the city. We were trying to get to Piazza San Marco. I was amused by the crooked chimney.













I took the picture on the left because of the small stone relief on the right of center window. It shows St. George slaying the Dragon. The legend is depicted quite often in both Venice and Florence through architectural details, sculptures, paintings, and so on.


Quintessentially Venetian.

To be continued...