Italy is agreeing with me.  I think I should have been born Italian, for the pasta if nothing else.  We have been having a great couple of days since the last post!

Firstly, we spent Sunday with my family getting ourselves ready and taking a trip to Bruggen to wander around the village and have a great snitzelly type dinner before being dropped at the Weeze Airport (heh) for our flight to Venice.

Venice has been a dream of mine since forever and it did not dissapoint.  We had a hotel that was right off the grand canal and we quickly became experts at negotiating the water busses.  It is just so different to go places by boat instead of cars and it is hard to imagine that it is not a novelty for the residents.

We went to Piazza Saint Marco and had a look around the basillica and wandered many many little streets that go off of there.  It's very easy to get lost... and we did... but out of sheer luck, we finally emerged about an hour later right near where we went into the maze.  We saw enough venetian glass to last a good while.  I guess shopping didn't end in Singapore... oopsies. 

We also spent time exploring the area around our hotel in the Ca'd'or district.  Lots of walking.  After a rest, my cousin Karen and I went off to find a gondola (not hard!) leaving Richard and his fragile motion-sick stomach behind for a rest.  We had a lovely time and were serenaded by a studmuffin of a gondolier who lalala-ed with an Italian accent as we floated a long.  A girl could get used to this :-)

This morning we went back to the square and toured through the Bassilica Saint Marco (can't find my map so i guarantee that is spelled wrong) and spent a good while gazing at the fantastic moziacs throughout the hugh church.  They also had a treasury with a lot of stuff from the 11th century an even some pieces from several hundred B.C.  And there was a crypt with shrivelled bones of saints and stuff.  That was a bit creepy crawly... especially the hand.

This afternoon we grabbed the train to Florence and found our hotel without any drama (yay karen for booking us in a great location).  We wandered around a bit and found somewhere for a pasta dinner (I've eaten more pasta in the past couple days than ever before but it is veeery good). 

Tomorrow we will be spending the day exploring Florence before catching an overnight train to Munich where we are visiting a concentration camp and then heading to the wedding location for the weekend.  I don't expect there will be wi-fi at the chalet in Austria so this may be the last post until next week when we are in Paris.   So until then, Ciao!