Rick Steves is stuck in Venice Italy

With everybody grounded in Europe, lucky Rick Steves is camping out in Venice, Italy.

Oh, the horror!

I'm having such fun here and such a rich researching experience that I still shudder to think I missed being stuck in London by less than a day when I flew out just before the Iceland eruption.

....

I spent my first two full days here not laying my eyes on St. Mark's Square. It's the back lanes where this enchanting city is most enchanting. Today I needed to go to the place where the causeway from the mainland hits the island to check out the parking garage situation and see the new “People Mover” monorail (which opens this week and will shuttle people from the big car park to Piazza Roma). The traffic on Piazza Roma hit me like a big fart. As I dodged traffic on Piazza Roma, the contrast hit me. I realized what a charming world the Venetians enjoy with no traffic noise and completely owning their byways as pedestrians.

I've spent three days pounding what must be my favorite pavement in Europe. Guides are sharing insights: Donkey meat sausage, asino, is a local treat. A many-generations-old sign cut into the fish market wall reminds merchants that sardines must be 7 centimeters long and Peocio (mussels) must be 3 cm long. Then someone graffittied El Mio 3.7 cm (I'm sure it's a rude joke, but I'm not that good with metric to know). Benetton just purchased the huge post office fronting the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge and will turn it into some kind of shopping mall.


more: http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/

I was supposed to be in Dallas yesterday. I'm in Düsseldorf instead.

Like they did with Ghost Hunters on Halloween.

Just follow Rick around in Italy live while he's stuck there and see what all he can find to do off the top of his head.

:smoke:

Although, I wouldn't mind extra time in Italy. I love that place!

I was there for 5 days once. The Italians forced me to eat good food. They have no mercy. I was also forced to wash the food down with excellent wine. And if that weren't enough they are friendly with a great sense of humor.

three weeks. It was a hellish experience of such ridiculous impositions as homemade wine, homemade grappa, freshly-killed organic pork (don't get me started, served with garden peas and lima beans in a delicious gravy--the bastards!) And nearly everyday, someone was asking me, "Voi gelati?"

Do I want ice cream, in 90-degree weather? Does the Pope wear a yarmulke? (Sometimes--it's a keppe-looking dealio! Just saying.) I ate flavors of ice cream I only dreamed about as a child. And I ate scungili, calimari, sardines--fresh from the Mediterranean, which is everything you ever read about it for "ink-dark" and "calme" and Italy--especially in the south, even has picturesque beaches I even wanted to swim in when it was too cold--even off of Calabrese beaches which are not really anything touristy and where the odors of boats and miasmas and sometimes sulfurous who-knows what leave one clinging to the shore. A little.

But me--I swam my guts out and ate any fish set in front of me, most fruits, and drank down the wine stores of family so much I felt a little guilty.

For their part, I like to think my American appetites for everthing, combined with my utter ineptness with their language, was at least somewhat amusing to my Italian in-laws. If I had to be stranded anyplace--I'd pick Italy, the south especially. (Or course, so long as my hubby could translate for me, since I just can't learn to be totally conversational.

He laments that the most fluent I was was when I went to the jewellers. So? Commerce is the universal lingua.)

:sarcasm:

And I love the term "screwn".

There are far worse places to get stuck!

:shrug:

As well as the author of several excellent "how to" travel books.

He's also a well-known advocate for the decriminalization of marijuana.

It's wonderful that you embrace it as the opportunity that seems to have presented itself for you. Hopefully many others are just as lucky.

Then, there's eating!

NG!

The glass is always half empty to some people.

Having stood in many a delay/cancellation line in airports, I don't relish that thought for a second.

(a bella citta, but overrun with people) and leave the neat, out-of-the-way places for those of us with some initiative of our own to find. I HATE that he does all the leg work for lazy Americans who just follow the travel instructions in his book like obedient sheep.

And he JUST noticed there is no traffic noise in Venice? Please.




edited for typo

Not everyone with the initiative to find such places has the time or the money (or the ability). I think he's got a great angle.

:)

He's making a mint turning hidden gems into Disneylands for American tourists.

:smoke:

I just came back from Italy 3 weeks ago.