First Weekend

Hi guys!

After looking at your comments, I am so glad that this blog is making so many of you want to come to Venice and some of you also want to write. That’s fantastic! For anyone who is really interested in writing, there is a program called National Novel Writing Month, it involves spending the month of November writing a 50,000 word novel. It’s really fun and they actually have a Young Writer’s Program for anyone under the age of 17, where you can set your own word count goals. If anyone is interested in checking out either of these sites, I have posted the links to them in the sidebar under “Other Websites to Check Out.” I’ll be going for it, I hope some of you will try it out, too! In answer to a post, Kaitlyn, congrats on your new sister coming and I hope everything goes well with your braces. Very good question, by the way, yes, actually, the flight attendant on my flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Venice did have a very strong accent and they did all of the announcements in German and English. It was pretty cool.

Thursday afternoon was the beginning of our first weekend in Venice. We have three day weekends every weekend so that we have time to travel. Since it was only the first weekend, we didn’t go far, only across the lagoon to the Lido, which is a beach resort on the Adriatic Sea. The Lido is also one of the islands that protects the main part of Venice from the ocean. We didn’t get to the beach until about 4:30 in the afternoon, so it was a little cooler, but still warm enough to get in the water a bit. It was great to be in the ocean, even if it was only for a little bit. It was awesome too because on the other side of the Adriatic there’s Greece, then the Mediterranean Sea, then Africa. It was just so crazy, mind-boggling really, to stand in that water and think that maybe it was the same water which had once washed against the shores of Egypt or Turkey or the Greek isles.

Friday was our tour of the Venetian ghetto. Like I said before, this was not a ghetto in the way we normally think of it in America. The Venetian ghetto was where the Jews used to be forced to live, up until fairly recently. There are still some Jewish people living there, but there are other people living there, too, and Jewish people are now allowed to live anywhere they want in Venice. Originally, Jews weren’t allowed to live in Venice at all, but because Christians at the time could not lend money and Jews could, they were allowed to live on the small island of the ghetto, where they were shut in each night, with guards which they had to pay set up on the bridges to make sure that no Jews left the ghetto before dawn. Many were also taken to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, during World War II. There were two different Holocaust memorials in the ghetto that were incredibly moving. They included artworks of the Jews being taken to the concentration camps and a wall listing the names of all the Venetian Jews who did not return from the concentration camps. Of the 200 Venetian Jews who were taken to the camps, only eight made it home.

We were able to go in to see three different synagogues. They were very beautiful, especially the last one we went into, which was the biggest. It had an intricately carved altarpiece and a cabinet built for holding the Torah made of marble. This synagogue was actually used in the opening scene of the film The Merchant of Venice, originally a play by William Shakespeare. We are actually going to be able to see this movie on Monday night. I’m excited to see the synagogue on film after we were actually there. Two interesting facts about the synagogues in the ghetto: first, women are kept separated from men, because men are supposed to keep their minds only on God during the religious services; also, the synagogues are not built on the ground floors of the buildings, instead, they are built on the highest level of the building they are in, with apartments underneath. This is because, according to Jewish law, there should be nothing above the synagogue but God, and so, because they had such a small area to cram in so many people, they built the synagogues on the top floors of buildings so that apartments could be built underneath them for people to live in.

On Saturday, a few of us had originally planned to go to the mall outside of Venice. However, we had a pretty big storm that morning and it rained for several hours, so we decided to postpone the trip. I’m hoping we’ll get to go sometime this coming weekend, though. So, instead of going to the mall, I went with Audrey and Caylen from our group to the main part of Venice to take pictures of the campos, squares outside of churches, which we had each chosen for an assignment for class where we had to talk about the architectural features on the buildings there. Caylen’s campo was further away, so she went off to take pictures of hers while Audrey and I went together to find ours. It was still raining somewhat and I didn’t have an umbrella. However, when we got to my campo, a guy selling umbrellas came up and said he could sell me one for 5 euros. That was a pretty good deal, but I told him no anyway and he asked how much I would pay for it. I told him 2 euro and he said no, 4. I told him I would give him 3 and he accepted. I was pretty excited about how the bartering worked and it was also very nice to have an umbrella, especially since it was raining pretty hard.

After I took some pictures of my campo, we kept walking towards Audrey’s, but partway there we came across another campo that she decided she liked better because there were more architectural features to talk about. The church there was open, so we went in and to our surprise found a Biennale (the art fair currently being hosted in Venice) exhibit about antique instruments. It was a really great exhibit, they had violins, violas, cellos, double basses, oboes, clarinets, mandolins, and harps, plus there was classical music by Vivaldi playing in the background. Not to mention that the church itself was small but lovely. This is one of the things I love about wandering around Venice: even when you’re not looking for it, you can still stumble upon some amazing stuff.

The rain cleared off nicely and by Sunday the weather was gorgeous again, though a bit colder than it had been. I spent most of Sunday working on stuff for class. However, since it was so nice, Shannon, from class, and I took our laptops and read outside under the barbeque pavilion for awhile. It was nice because there was a view through a window in the wall of the lagoon outside. Then, after Shannon had gone back in to charge her laptop and I was just walking around the island procrastinating because I didn’t feel like reading anymore for the moment, I ran into Dane and Sara and while we were all procrastinating, we stumbled on another art installation, again for the Biennale, that was on the island. It was a very modern-art type of exhibit, but it was pretty cool. There was one picture that was all sorts of ripped up pieces of magazines that were put together like a collage that looked like a face.

So, all in all, that was my weekend. It was a pretty good one. I’m really looking forward to this week and weekend, though. Today we went to the Doge’s Palace, which was spectacular, but this post is long enough, so I’ll write about that next time, then later this week we are going to try to go to the mall, we are going to the actual Biennale, where the majority of the art exhibits are, and we are planning a trip to Verona, Italy for Saturday. Verona, which is only about a two hour train ride from Venice, is most famous for being the city in which Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is set. I’ll have posts up to say how all of this goes later in the week. Take care, everyone, thank you so much for your comments and questions, keep them coming!

Ciao,

Maria : )