But first, today Jason got in big trouble for something he did with another kid in the neighborhood … Problem is, he’s so cute even when he’s doing bad things! Anyway, resolving it involved walking to two houses in the neighborhood and apologizing to two different families. And he’s only 6!
When things like this happen I reach back into my childhood and say, “Ah yes, I screwed up in the same way … That’s my boy!” But now I am starting to wondering if I am rewriting history a little bit when I do that. I can’t be sure whether I am remembering things just so or whether I am inventing a few memories along the way. All I remember for sure is, I had troubles, one of the biggest ones being appropriate behavior at appropriate times. I sure hate to see Jason struggle the way I did.
But this post is about Venice. I’d love to pack in some more pictures about Rome but maybe I will let Sue get a word in edgewise.
We left Rome in this:
and arrived in Venice to this:
We arrived at our hotel 40 minutes later. This was the view out one of our windows:
That first night we went to dinner and were treated to this view:
When on vacation I usually need more of this:
than I actually get. But then again, I need more of that in general.
Here are my impressions of Venice: it’s neat, but crazy, wasteful, a bad idea in general. While we were there the water levels were high and lots of places just flooded at high tide, and shop owners mopped the water out of their shops as soon as the water receded. This is a recurring event, 200 times/year on average. Crazy way to live. This is what they do to allow people without boots (all the tourists) to get around during the floods:
The place is 100% tourist oriented, which means everything is expensive, a lot of it is garbage, and it’s relentless. I literally reached my limit on the third day and was getting a little grumpy. Still, despite the almost oppressive touristy atmosphere of on the island of Murano, we did manage to have a good time checking out some of the neat glass products. When we first got there:
I felt immense pressure to buy something and there was a period of awkwardness for me (and perhaps Sue) that made me very uncomfortable until I realized that I wasn’t going to do anything I didn’t want to do. Finally I said that I didn’t see anything we were interested in, and off we went. Bizarre situation that was probably blown up and out of proportion in my own mind more than anything else. But afterwards it was fun walking around and checking things out that we actually might be interested in buying, rather than £800 hunks of glass for our nonexistent coffee table: beautiful, amazing to look at, but not what we were looking for at all.
Sue says I like to focus on the negative and she might be right. There are lots of other pictures for the things we did in Rome and Venice I will let her share in a positive light. It was a truly amazing place to visit, I must say. Sue and I did have a fantastic dinner on her birthday: I didn’t screw up this time!! I’ll let her tell you all about it.
Before I go, however, I want to show you this picture we took with the new camera I mentioned in the first article. This ultra-compact camera has image stabilization, which allowed me to take the following picture without a tri-pod:
This shot was taken with “Slow-Syncro” flash mode, which is the mode I have talked about with my Rebel Xt, where the camera’s exposure is set based on the ambient lighting, but then the flash is fired as well just long enough to light up the foreground subjects. The end result is you can see the background as well as the foreground, and if you look at this shot closely you can see that the moon is only a little bit blurred despite the fact that I held the camera in my hands for a 1 second exposure. That is incredible. This picture came out so well.
Also in that general area was this happening place we didn’t find until it was too late the last night. A place for wine and fine foods. This was also taken without a flash, 1/3 second exposure, captures the essence quite nicely. You can see one person completely blurred out during that 1/3 second on the right hand side of the store. Good stuff!
