Day 23 – May 22, 2010 – Sunshine makes me well!

Off today in Venice after two days in bed, feeling not so happy. I thought I should get some sun and fresh air in Venice today with Eric and Pieter. We took a water taxi over to Piazza San Marco today for the first time, since I didn’t have much energy and it was a new way to see the city as well. They left from our cruise ship port and went around the southwestern side of the city until we hit the very busy dock.

 
It  was a perfect day, so tons of people were out, especially in the square. We took a terrified Eric through the swarms of pigeons who live there and he hung on to Pieter for dear life, lol.

We got some food at an outdoor café and I had some delicious salad and spaghetti pomodoro.

We   wanted to try to find this one church that you can see from so many of the places we’d been, but didn’t know how to get there. I ended up finding this church on the map that I got from my hotel the first night I stayed in Venice. It’s actually an incredible map of Venice, which is hard to find!

We headed in the church’s direction, passing the Peggy Guggeheim Collection, which is a museum of the American art collector’s pieces (hoping to make it there one of these weeks!). The church was brilliant and was the first massive, very old structure I’ve seen so far. It was quite busy, with lots of tourists sitting on the steps, looking out over the water to Piazza San Marco. The statues embedded in the structure were active and seemed alive. There was so much movement and life in them.

We walked further down the peninsula that the church kind of lived on and at the tip, there is an art museum or exhibition space of some sort. There is a huge marble statue of a little boy holding a frog at the very edge of the peninsula. He’s guarded by a surly security officer and tons of people try to take pictures with him.

We headed back to the ship then and just barely made it in time, again! Oh well… at least we got there. I was wiped out from a busy day on 50% energy, so I stayed in bed the rest of the afternoon until the new Welcome Aboard show – the cast does a couple numbers from the Colorz show and the orchestra plays a bit. It was a nice kickoff to the week, but very little help was needed back stage, so it was an easy night of work for me. Then up to Shadow Dancing in Bliss at 11:30 pm. I got some cool pictures this time and bowled a terrible game of bowling! I’m feeling much better though and excited about that for sure.