Venice Italy, What I know...



Venice, Italy



This weekend we went to Venice, while I acknowledge that Venice is a beautiful city perfect for pictures, I have quite a few gripes. Most of my issues deal with the cleanliness of the city. The logistics of a city with canals instead of streets might be enough for most people to overlook the trash and scum, sorry I give no allowances. The Italians are not known for their cleanliness and a city with no grass full Narrow streets packed with tons of smoking tourist could only be made worse with dogs. Yes I know that lots of people are dog lovers the Europeans most of all but when walking down a concrete "street" barley wide enough for two people to pass, the last thing I want is a dog urinating on the side wall, which really just means on your feet. I know that even in areas with plenty of grass dog owners are required to carry those little bags with them, but let's face the truth not everyone uses them, now let's go back to a city of concrete with narrow passage ways. You use your imagination.

A few shots of the narrow streets

All that being said we did take some great pictures and see some fun things. But even after a short trip in Europe it makes me realize I might not say it enough but I am very happy that we fly a red, white and blue flag outside our house!



Sam on the water fromt



Canal and boats

Us on one of the many bridges

Canal

Canals

Tower in St. Marco's Square

View from the top of the tower in St. Marco's Square



A Chagall at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection



Another beautiful canal

These are pictures taken in the jewish ghetto, in the 1500s Jews were forced to live in this square they could go out during the day but at dusk they had to be inside the gates that were locked and gaurded by Christian gaurds. At one time there was over 5,000 people living in this confined area, therefore they had to start building up. You can see that in this area are some of the tallest buildings in Venice, if you look closely you can see that the windows are smaller on some floors the ceilings on some of these stories were very low, again to fit more living space for people. As I am sure you can guess the Jewish ghetto area was used again during the 20th century. One of these pictures shows some barb wire still in place and by just coincidence some Italian army members. The book said there are only about 35 Jewish people living here today, very sad.

Peppers at the market

One of many churches although most are not still open.

Canal

Laura in Venice, Italy

Sam outside of Harry's bar Ernest Hemingway was a regular here.

St. Marco's Square at night

Gondula

Venice, Italy

Laura in St. Marco's Square

Canal and boat

Venice, Italy September 2012

Pictures of Koblenz...

I got a new camera this week! Sam and I decided to go try it out on a family day trip to Koblenz. You may have heard of this city because it is the point where two large rivers intersect and start flowing together, the Rhine River and the Mosel River. But if you are not as up to date on your Germany geography as I am and are wondering where else you could have heard about the city of Koblenz. That would be last November when a huge WWII bomb was found, they claim an American bomb but we wonder how they can tell. In November the Rhine River was lower then it had been obviously since the war, apparently the river is used to more then the 9 out of 10 days of rain we were receiving that month, because of this the bomb was found. It was a big deal in these parts they made a date to evacuate an area around the bomb and somehow safely detonated the bomb.

Here are a few pictures of me fooling around with my new Lumix camera...

Sam and Laura in a park (trying out a feature that lets me blur the background)

Cute street

Laura and I on the Mosel side of the river fork

Laura Monkeying around

The fort in Koblenz (again trying out a new feature on the camera, sepia)

The City from the fort

These are pieces of the Berlin wall. I was very excited to see this piece of German history, there is not a lot of historical things to see from the darker parts of Germany's past and I felt this wall definitely was something historical from a sad part of their history. Unfortunately the German's treated this the same way they treat a lot of things from this time in their history, they ignore it. A flea market was set up in this park and someone literally set their table right in front of the display.