Venice :)

First day in Venice was really awesome!  I think it probably turned out to be my favourite in Italy :)  Only bad part was to travel to any of the different islands we had to buy Vaparetto (water bus) tickets which were really expensive for public transportation.  Then we had to wait to get on the water buses for ever so that part was really annoying.  Eventually we were off to the island of Murano which is famous for glassblowing.  We walked around a perused the shops enjoying the beautiful day.  Some of the shopkeepers were really rude so I waited to purchase my Venetian glass from the main island.  We bought some food from the grocery store and the next thing on the agenda was to ride the water bus to the island of Lido which is where the beach is.  It took forever for us to find a vaparetto that would take us there, and finally we were helped by some friendly canadian women.  When we finally arrived on Lido we stopped to get gelato and then headed straight to the beach.  Unfortunately, that day it was super windy and sand was blowing everywhere.  When we tried to lay down the sand was blowing into our eyes and it was kind of miserable.  I walked along the shore because the sand wasn't blowing there.  The body of water at Lido is the Adriatic Sea.  We eventually picked up and made our long water bus journey back to the hotel.  That evening, we went to try to bargain for a cheap gondala ride but the best we could do was 25 euros each.  That is a lot of money so we decided to skip it and sit on a dock and watch the boats sail by instead.  It was pretty awesome.