Venice Day 1

Well after a poor night sleep due to the large amount of noise just outside our hotel room, we set off to explore Venice. We had a good day and basically made our way towards the Piazza St Marco which is one of the major Vanice attractions, on the way we visited the Guggenheim museum, being the complete twat that I am, I didn't realise that there were multiple Guggenheim museums around the world, I had a vague understanding that one existed in America, and I believed that it was in New York, but apart from that I knew nothing. I now know that Peggy Guggenheim collected a very large amount of modern art and began exhibiting the art quite a long time ago, she also had a daughter who was an artist, who typically for an artist died young from depression related problems (overdose of her medication).

I have to admit that for a large part of my tour around the Guggenheim, I was wondering what ot was all about, and in general I have decided that modern art is from artists who like myself suffer from a short attention span, meaning that they either can't finish what they start (much like me) or get distracted(much like me) by other things during the creation of a piece, and include the distractions into the piece that they are working on.

Either way, to me art that has to be described to you to be appreciated is missing the mark, but as usual on this trip, I know very little and much more important people than myself have already decided otherwise, so I'll leave you to make up your own mind.....

Once out of the Guggenheim we continued on to the Piazza St Marco, and discovered that the square (or plaza) had been overtaken by a fashion show and some major construction works, so we took some photo's and had a good look around, but we moved on quite quickly due to the large crowds and lack of photo opportunities.

On the way back from the Guggenheim, we discovered a little art gallery that had a very strong opinion on American culture, see photo's of Mr R McDonald and Ms Wonder Woman and Batman for an idea of what I mean. Funny thing was that as we walked into the courtyard with the scuplture of Sir Ronald's head in someone else's hand, a large group of USA citizens followed us in, "oh that's not nice" and "what's that all about" were the phrases being uttered, so I felt compelled to mention that it was the venetians opinion on American culture, meanwhile Carol was telling me to shutup and 2 british tourists thought it was very funny. The citizens of the USA still didn't seem to understand, or didn't hear me as I didn't have an American accent, either way I thought I should at least try and clear up their confusion.....

After "the incident", we moved on to have some lunch and discovered a cafe that was serving 1L beers, so I had one of those (of course) and we eventually moved on to have a look at the Rialto bridge, this once again was covered with banners advertising various things, so we didn't take any photo's, but the Bridge itself was impressive and worth a look in itself.

Overall Venice is a lovely city for a visit, tomorrow morning we're planning on rising early to head across town to photograph the Sigh bridge and we might take some piccies of some of the other sights as we come back, once we're done with that we'll head off to Salzburg.

I hope you're all enjoying the blog, talk to you soon, Richard and Carol

Pics from our day in Venice