Saturday, May 28, 2011

Chan Brothers Europe Tour: Venice- Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square)and Gondola Ride :Day 5-Part 1

Today is the 5th day of our Europe tour in Italy. Our tour group proceeded to Venice, the second last destination in Italy. I have also been wanting to visit Venice- a city which is sinking! Since young, I have knew about Venice the unique city and hence it is with great excitement that we embarked on our journey to Venice.

We went to a pier after alighting from coach and boarded a cruise to Piazza San Marco of Venice.


Upon setting foot on St Mark's Square, the St Mark's Campanile,  the bell tower of St Mark's Basilica struck a great impression on me!


And finally we arrived at the St Mark's Basilica!


For the past few days while we were in Italy, we had been visiting churches after churches. These churches are centuries-old and are so immense and magnificiently beautiful that these are art in themselves! Every church leaves a lasting impression on us!

First on our itinery: Glass blowing factory! Enroute to the factory, we were shown the bridge of signs. Why was this bridge called as such? Well, the bridge leads to a prison and hence those on the bridge heading to the prison are of course heaving with signs.

At the glass factory blowing, after the demonstration, we were shown hundreds and hundreds of elaborate art pieces but all of them were expensive. The tour group left without purchasing anything from the factory.


The next item was everyone's favorites: the Gondola rides of Venice! Our tour group split ourselves up among 5 gondolas.



It is amazing that the local people of Venice use water transport such as the gondolas for daily commute. I can imagine that it is quite inconvenient though interesting from them to commute this way, daily.

The houses of the locals are in perfect harmony with the waters, though I wonder when Venice will eventually sink. A beautiful city then will be lost!



For lunch, the majority of our tour group settled for the famous black ink squid noodles. It was very nice noodles to me, like Chinese Hokkien Mee.



We proceeded to the final stop of our Italy tour: Milan after lunch!