England

• London (6/9, 6/10, 6/24)

Italy

• Rome (6/11, 6/12)

• Capri (6/14)

• Sorrento (6/14)

• Pompeii (6/15)

• Assiss (6/15)

• San Marino (6/16)

• Venice (6/16, 6/17)

• Verona (6/18)

• Lugano (6/18)

• Como (6/19)

• Milan (6/19)

• Pisa (6/20)

• Florence (6/21)

• Siena (6/21)

• Rome (6/22, 6/23)

Friday, 06/17

Venice at last...

• This morning, we took the water taxi into town (wow, this sounds really cool).  After docking near St. Mark's Square (Piazza San Marco), we first went to the glass blowing factory to see a glass-making demo by a trained master.  Then it was free time to walk around St. Mark's Square and browsed shops.

• At noon, we toured Basilica di San Marco (St. Mark's Basilica), the so called "Church of Gold."  Its style incorporates elements from Byzantium, Romanesque and Gothetic.  It was a little disappointing that I couldn't take any pictures of the very lavishly embellished interior of the basilica.

• We then went next door to Palazzo Ducale (Doges' Palace), the residence of the elected doges (dukes) who ruled Venice for over 1000 years.

• Then it was some more free time to take pictures of the canals, gondolas and sat at St. Mark's Square listening to the orchestra.  My stupid camera decided to cause trouble in the afternoon; the pictures I took had a weird purplish tint to them.

Saturday, 06/18

Camera crisis... averted

• We had an hour this morning to explore the town of Verona, home of Juliet's balcony.  There was a bronze statue of Juliet and it was quite distasteful to see smirking guys after smirking guys stroking one of the bare breasts.

• I still can't believe that my camera decided to bail on me when I still have another 5 days left on the tour.  So while other people were sightseeing in Verona, I was contemplating on what I should do.  My only options were to buy some disposable cameras and pray that the pictures would turn out ok, or buy another digital camera.  I had checked the price of Canon A95 the night before; the price of the same camera in a Verona store was definitely not competitive.

• After Verona, we crossed the border to Switzerland and stopped at the town Lugano.   The weather was mild and very pleasant.  We did some shopping at the Bucherer store where I got a Swiss army knife.

• I wish today would be less eventful but that was totally wishful thinking...  Before we left for dinner, we opened the window and left it open even after we got back to the room.  Just when we were ready to go to sleep, one glance at the ceiling raised total alarm bells...  For there were hundreds of bugs (with probably lots of mosquitoes in their midst).  So Po called Pietro first wanting to change the room.  It was 11 PM and we unfortunately woke him up.  He said there's nothing he could do so I went down to the front desk to ask for bug spray.  The person at the first desk asked if the window was opened and gave me a look that said what did I expect....  He then said he would send someone from housekeeping to take care of the problem for us.  Someone from housekeeping eventually came and sprayed the ceiling...  But we were skeptical that all the bugs were exterminated.  So we decided upon ourselves that we should do our part to ensure a bug-bite free night.  The first order of business was to turn the air conditioning all the way up...

The hotel room was set up such that the room could be divided into two parts.  I'll draw the floor plan when I'm bored later... The two beds were on one side of the door frame while the closet, bathroom were on the other end.  We dragged the two mattresses across the room into the smaller part of the room, then set the two bed frames on chairs borrowed from the lobby.  Afterwards we draped bed covers over the bed frames, as well as a blanket over the chairs to ensure a total barricade. 

 

Well, I'm very happy to say that neither of us had a single bug bite that night thanks to our fool-poof total barricade system.  MacGyver would've been proud of us.

 

• Nice view from the hotel window...

Sunday, 06/19

A way too busy day...

• We took a boat cruise around Lake Como in the morning.  Pietro pointed out the various mansions that famous people own.  The emerald-coloured lake is simply gorgeous.  I only wished the cruise were longer than the mere 1 hr we got.  We didn't even get anywhere near Bellagio.

• Then we were off to Milan, the fashion capital of Italy.  Here, we visited the Duome, decorated by all the beautiful stained-glass windows.  It apparently took over 5 centuries to finish this Gothic church.  We also went to the Opera House and Pinacotecca Castello.  I'm not sure what this Pinacotecca Castello place is, since Frommer's guide only mentions Pinacotecca Ambrosiana and Pinacotecca di Brera.