SlishaCrazy

Pretty and pretty busy. As I mentioned earlier K and I ended up in Venice on a weekend. At least thankfully it was two weekends before Clooney and Amal decided to get married. (I heard they shut the grand canal for their wedding, I would have been royally photography hollywoodly pissed with them. Imagine planning ahead and spending so much money just to know that the biggest attraction in Venice is closed.) We reached Venice late evening on Friday but by the time we stood in the queue and another and got waterbus tickets, it was an hour and the water bus itself took an hour to take us to our bnb because we stayed in Lido, an island off the Venice islands at we reached there at 10pm. We took a Rolling Venice card by the way. It's an under-29 card that gives you discounts etc. The one hour water bus journey from the train station through the Grand Canal under the Rialto bridge and the Bridge of Sighs, out into the sea near San Marco and stopping every 3 minutes, ...

On a 'fine' Wednesday morning K and I took a fast train from Rome to Florence. It rained a lot during the journey and on our way to find our little airbnb-booked guest house. Cute it was. And raining the morning was. And sleepy we were. And nothing to do till 11am to go for the renaissance tour by the Florence Free tours. (So you can imagine how early we woke up). The renaissance tour introduced us to some of the beauty of Florence with the sculptures and paintings of the great renaissance artists including of course, our favourite Michaelangelo. The tour started at Piazza San Marta Novella and walked through to the Florence cathedral, and the church of Santa Croce. The Florence cathedral is a different kind of beauty, a renaissance church in all its glory. It had a dome that is at odds with the rest of the structure because the calculations were slightly off and the dome had to be constructed differently with an octagonal base. The guide also pointed out Flor...

On Wednesday, we spent most of the day at the Vatican. Not really. You can go to the Vatican museum (including the Sistine Chapel) and Saint Peter's Basilica without issue even though they are within the Vatican border. But we can't go beyond that without permission. The museum is really vast and it's recommended to take a guided tour. The only one that was available was at 8.30 in the morning. We took it anyway, assuming we can also do the basilica before lunch. As it turns out, the basilica is closed on Wednesday mornings. The Pope gives audience and gives sermon at 11 am and it doesn't have a scheduled end time. So we ended up spending a good 4.5 hours in the museum. The guide said Wednesday mornings were the best time to visit the museum because of less crowds with the basilica closed, but we didn't understand that until after an hour after the tour ended. The guided tour lasted for about two hours. The guide showed us some amazing sculptures of people a...