Venice- Art Museums have Hidden Treasures

As we continued on our journey, we stumbled upon a free art gallery. The art was cool, but the real prize was a free bathroom! After that, we always stopped in free art galleries- and they always had nice bathrooms. 

The art gallery also had these scenic balconies

Best picture of the whole trip!

The cool arm statue was in the background looking the other way

Look! The ocean!

Venice is a great place to be in love

Also a great place for pictures of pets dressed in fancy clothes

 As we were walking along, a very persistent older man popped out of nowhere and strongly urged us into a building we were passing by. It looked like a big mall, so we were confused. In his broken English, he said something about the building being really old and cool. We weren't in a rush, so went in for the heck of it. 

This used to be a very fancy ballroom for some rich family. Now it is a very expensive mall.

We went up to the top to see what the views would be like, and stumbled on this interesting art exhibit. It was called "Water Bones."

The real reward was the view from the roof. What a view! Thanks random guy for shoving us in here!

We could see pretty much all of Venice from up there. 

Here's the team on top of the famous Rialto bridge. It was just a wee bit crowded. 

I'm going to keep on sticking in my "pretty ally" pictures. They make me happy.

 We eventually made our way to St. Mark's plaza. This is the big tourist destination of Venice. The old Doge's Palace is here, along with a few other beautiful buildings and thousands of fearless pigeons. 

That blue thing is an astronomical clock. It has zodiac symbols on it.

Here's a tower that we were considering paying to go in before we got the awesome free view on top of that mall

And the crown jewel- St. Mark's Basilica! Note the guy in the background with a pigeon on his arm.

 The Basilica used to be the Doge's private church, and it was incredibly ornate. The entire ceiling was covered in gold mosaic bible scenes. Much of the gold came from a crusade in Constantinople in 1202. It was incredibly, mind blowingly ornate. Claudia went to Catholic School, so it was nice having her around to tell us what various parts of the building were for. 

Pictures can't capture the beauty of the building, which is probably why they don't let cameras in. This is a stock photo.

After we had absorbed the basilica, we found a nearby grocery store where we bought fruit and stuff to make sandwiches, which we ate in the square while fending off the oh-so-bold pigeons. 

It blows my mind that people can make statues like these. 

This street performer was rocking it on the crystal glass cups

I made the mistake of making eye contact with this mime. Luckily we were able to escape before he followed us too far.

Aaron pretending to have a pregnant belly like me.
(Actually his shoulders were sore from carrying both of our stuff around non-stop for 3 days.)

We walked about 10 miles that one day in Venice, with much effort spent finding the best gelato place and finding a shop for Stephen to buy a knock-off gondolier hat. It was incredible. I'm grateful for the constantly busy maintenance workers who keep this historical gem from sinking into the lagoon!

We had some hurdles getting off the island. We had to take a bus from the island to a nearby airport to get back to Madrid. I originally bought the bus tickets for the day after by mistake. I emailed them and asked if I could take the same bus the day before, and they said sure. We made our way over to the not-very-well labeled bus stop 40 minutes early and sat there for a while. We asked some guy if we were in the right place, and he confidently told us yes even though we weren't seeing any buses from our line. We found a wi-fi spot, and I checked the bus website. I found out that their Thursday bus schedule was completely different than their Friday bus schedule, and there were no more buses running that would get us to our flight on time.

Some frantic running around led us to a travel help desk that confirmed that our tickets were good for nothing. Fortunately, there was another bus service to the airport that we could catch if we hustled over to a different stop. We made it on time and realized that there were two buses going to two different nearby airports. I was pretty positive about which one it was, and we were about to buy those tickets. Fortunately, Aaron double checked our flight, and I was dead wrong! Basically it was pretty miraculous that we made it to our flight on time.