So, Venezia.

Beautiful. Absolutely stunning at every turn. We've taken a few hundred too many pictures and spent a little too much money on venetian glass beads.

Melissa discovered Meringata - meringue and icecream layered cake. Kate discovered Brie and Pear Pizza. We ate the same place about 5 times in 5 days. They had super duck placemats - superduck, spiderduck, batduck, flashduck, laraduck...

We saw fireworks for a random festival, pretty cool. italians like to be as ostentatious as possible so the half hour display cos millions of euro and lit up the sky above the lagoon and the churches of the giudecca beautifully! We got lost trying to get home. We followed few thousand people through the streets of venice and gave ourselves a night tour of venice.

We drank Bellini's and listened to classical music at a bar that opened in 1720 in Piazza di San Marco.

We randomly ran into Lee from rome as he rounded a corner lost. we were lost too.

It was very hot and yucky weathered. so we ate lots of gelati. in fact we ate the best gelati of our lives!

we managed a trip out to murano to see the glass makers and their furnaces. we got yelled at by scary men in the shops if they caught us touching the glass. probably a good thing really.

We went into San Marco and marveled at the gold gilded ceiling and climbed the campanile. when we say climbed we mean that for the first time in one of these stupidly high up tourist attractions we made use of a lift. fabulous.

we went on a gondola! how romantic. well, i'm sure that if you were the couple in the gondola with the guitarist and opera singer it was very romantic, except that every other gondola was watching and listening and staring at you. we followed a gondolier who had a fabulous bottom. it was lovely. the city looks different from the canal rather than the path and we managed to get to some areas that are only accessible by water, so it was well worth it. Venice is beautiful. it's the only way to say it really. already dreaming of going back there...