Day 11

After leaving the campsite and two blokes from our group who had run out of money and were planning on going to Greece where they had some sort of jobs lined up, we headed towards Venice. This stop would have to be one of my favourites. After setting up our gear I charged my camera battery in a bathroom which gave the an excuse to chill out and read my book while I waited outside. Apparently that night people from another tour let down a lot of our tents – but I slept right on through. The next morning we caught a ferry to the Venice. I think that part of the city is on islands and the other part is on the mainland – we camped on the main land. When we got to the islands we went to a glass making demonstration and saw what was my highlight from the trip. The glass master had a glowing lump of glass on the end of a stick and he blew into it and pulled at it so casually and then all of a sudden it was a vase. He then grabbed the lip of it with his tongs and stretched it until it was really thin before whipping it back over itself and attaching it to the vase and vollah a handle! I then spotted a glass horse sitting on a shelf and thought to myself ‘it’s all very well making a vase but there is no way that you could make a horse using the same technique’. But he did. He started with a drippy chunk and pulled bits and teased it until he had a horse that he pulled off the stick and sat it perfectly on the table. It was so impressive. Apparently in order to be a glass master you need to have a fifteen year apprenticeship. After that we saw everything else in the shop that the glass master had made and we could purchase something if we wanted. The Horses cost twenty euro, a crazy colourful life sized cow head that sticks out from a table cost twenty three thousand – almost worth it though, it was very cool.
We then went to a lace shop and saw wad loads of Venetian lace. Apparently each piece needs to be completed by the same person that starts it and for this reason it is really expensive as it takes days for each piece to be completed. But the government supports the industry so a piece that would normally need to be sold for eight hundred euros to get its money back can be sold for one hundred. Then we had free time which i spent with a small group of people ambling through the tiny alleyways that made up the streets, looking into the funny shops and taking photos of the many canals. For lunch we had a really really thick slice of pizza followed up with some ice cream from a place where Stags and I were sure the girl was flirting with us. She only spoke limited English and us even far more limited Italian, and she was pretty. We sat in the shade in a small alley way, and then headed off to check out a massive church. This was the only place where I ever had any trouble with my sword – one of the guards asked me to remove it, while the other one jokingly acted out me slaying a dragon with it. When I returned and showed him my empty sheath, he wanted me to open my mouth to make sure I hadn’t hidden it down my throat. We then found our way through the labyrinth of streets to have our gondola rides through the canals, which was great fun. We saw where Mozart used to live and chatted to the Gondola captain Andrew and had a most pleasant afternoon. In each city that we went to I would always ask Christina the Canadian girl if she would ever live here and then she would ask me. Most answers were the same – ‘yeah I’d do it for a little while, but not forever’. With Venice I said that I wouldn’t have minded at all if I had been born there and at the age of fifteen left school to start my Glass masters apprenticeship. I could have happily lived as a glass master there and owned a gondola instead of a car.