Day 85 (Venice, Italy) – Murano glass

This morning I woke up early so I could spend the day over at Murano Island.  It’s a small island to the North of Venice where the famous Murano Italian glass is from.  To get there you have to hop on one of the water taxis.  The one I needed wasn’t too far from where I was staying but there wasn’t an easy way to get there.  I had to find my way through winding roads and over canals.  It proved to be more of a challenge than what I anticipated and I was beginning to realize that using a map was pointless.  Just when you think you’re heading in the right direction you run into a canal that has no bridge over it.  These canals were great to look at, but becoming a hassle to navigate around.

Just as I started to make some progress in getting to the taxi station one of my foot steps was met with an extremely soft cushion.  Uh oh, what did I just step in?  I looked back and was completely surprised.  Bear crap!  I didn’t know they had bears in Venice.  But there was no way that any kind of house pet could leave such a mountain of feces.  It had to be a bear crap and it was all over my sandals.  I couldn’t walk around all day smelling like crap after all I probably had enough BO since it was so hot here.  The only option was to wash it off some how.  Finally a good use for all these canals I was having such an issue with this morning.  I just hoped that I wouldn’t fall into the water because it looked really disgusting.

After washing off my sandals and a bit more trekking through the streets I finally made it to the taxi port and was on my way to Murano Island.  When I got there the sun was so hot that all I wanted to do was head inside to one of the air-conditioned glass shops to cool off.  I had no plan on buying anything because first of all I couldn’t afford any of it and second I wasn’t about to lug around any glass sculpture for 5 weeks in my backpack.  But I pretended to be a serious buyer and sulked up as much time in the AC as I could.

Once I was cooled off I walked around the island for awhile and found one of the actual glass factories where they let you watch how the glass figures were made.  It was a pretty interesting process.  I watched the guys create a dog figure which took about ten minutes, then walked inside to the gallery to see that the dog figure cost $200 euros.  Not a bad markup for ten minutes of work.

That night I went and grabbed a beer with a couple of Aussi’s guys that were staying in my room.  We found a bar that had a happy hour.  The prices still weren’t that great and the place wasn’t too happy so we only stayed for a short while before going home to crash.