A Day Full of Glass

Today breakfast was not so great. The hotel had hardly any variety in food choices for breakfast. There was ham and cheese, yogurt, cereal and small croissants. I ended up having a half a bowl of cereal and two mini croissants. The cereal looks like cornflakes but it tastes like something else. It's not my favorite. After breakfast we got on the Ferry boat #41 and took it to a small island named Murano. On the way to Murano Island, we saw an enormous cruise ship. I counted at least 15 stories but there were probably more. It made the large ferry boat look tiny. Even the tug boat directing the ship into dock was bigger than the ferry boat we were on. The ferry boats here are much smaller than the ferry boats in San Francisco. It took about 45-50 minutes to get to Murano Island because we made so many stops. However, the island is only 3 miles away. We went to Murano Island because it is world famous for the glass blowing factories and stores. We stopped at the museum first. At the museum I learned blown glass has been around since the 1st century. I liked how the museum showed the time periods of blown glass. You could easily see how the glass became thinner, more colorful and more decorative as you get closer to current time. Unfortunately we could not take any pictures since we were in a museum. The museum was pretty small but had a lot of ancient bowls and bottles on display as well as glass from the 1700-1800's like dishes and art pieces from today. In addition to that, there were many modern chandeliers and sculptures from blown glass. After the museum, we visited some of the hundreds of blown glass shops in the town of Murano. Murano has canals just like Venice and you can't even tell you are out of Venice in some areas. My mom purchased a lot of different things including a Christmas ornament and a thermometer that has balls with liquid inside a water tube that float up and down depending on the temperature. The cool part is the degrees are in Celcius. One of the funny things that is sold in these shops are glass ants. They aren't exactly true to size, but they are extremely small. One shop was charging 3 euros for one ant! That's over $5 dollars. We wanted to buy 20 of them for an interesting souvenier, but it was way too expensive. Many of the shops would not allow us to take pictures, probably becasue the tourists lose track of where they are and bump into things and break them. We shopped for a long time and finally stopped for lunch. After lunch, on our way back to the ferry, we stopped in a glass blowing factory that had been owned and worked by one family for many generations. They had photos on the wall of the factory from a long time ago and it looks much more modern today with all of the high tech glass blowing and heating equipment. I was able to take photos here. Hand blown glass is everywhere in Venice. Even the chandeliers in our hotel room are hand made and colorful. The one in my room looks like a rainbow octopus. Tonight we plan to have dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe. My mom has been collecting pins from all over the world and can't wait to get a Venice pin. It was 80+ degrees again here today and we continue to photograph the dogs we see on the street. I think we have already taken a picture of over 50 dogs and there are so many we miss because they hide in the crowds. I will be back on Tuesday next week and tomorrow will be my last post. What an amazing journey this has been!