Europe Day Thirty Two - Burano and Murano

In the morning we got our day-bags ready and headed out the door. We found our way back to St.Mark's square and to the docks. At the docks we bought taxi boat tickets to the islands of Burano, home of the famous colorful houses and Murano, home of the famous glass sculptures. But in order to get there you had to take three separate taxi boats that were stuffed to the rim with people. Our first stop was Murano.

 At Murano we went to a glass blowing tutorial. The way it works is that the glass welder melts the sand into a molten like state and it glows orange. He then uses a metal pipe and takes out some melted glass and rolls it across a table into a ball. Once the glass has hardened just enough that it doesn't drip he blows into metal pipe and almost like a balloon blows it into the shape of a vase. He then carefully flattens the bottom against the table. He sets that one down to cool and takes another glob of glass and starts to stretch it with metal prongs into a beautiful glass horse. Everybody in the group claps and tips the nice glass worker before heading over to the glass store. In the store there was a ton of sculptures but the most beautiful of them were the glass horses. Kaden and I both picked out a glass horse for only five dollars each. Kaden's was gold and mine was clear with one streak of blue from mane to tail. After thanking them again for the free tour we headed to the main street to find lunch and look at glass shops and sculptures.

As we walked the street we saw every type of glass animal possible. There were polar bears, lions, tree frogs, monkeys, pandas, and even lobsters. They had almost any type of animal you could imagine. Once we hit the end of the street we got some flatbread pizza and sat down next the biggest glass sculpture of them all.

Then we walked  back down the street and got on a taxi boat to Burano. After the long ride we stepped out and felt like we were in a different world. All the buildings were different rainbow colors and colorful windows, doors, boats, and canals. We walked the streets and Sage, Mom, Dad, and Zaddek bought scarfs for the cold nights ahead.

We took a ton of photos and had a cup of hot chocolate (really thick and creamy) before heading to the taxi boats in the dark. We rode back cramped again in a stupid taxi boat to Venice. At one of the last stops we grabbed some pasta for dinner before jumping back on the boat.

Once we got to our stop we walked back to the room exhausted from the long day.

Total water taxis: 5

Total miles walked: 6.1 miles