I left my home in Florence on Saturday morning, having packed about half of my things and left the rest (mostly souvenirs and wine bottles) at my host’s place to pick up next weekend. It didn’t take me all that long to get to Venezia, changing trains once and watching the subtle changes in the terrain—green Tuscany with its hills swimming in mist, Emilia golden under patches of snow and brambles—until suddenly, we weren’t on land at all, and to our left and right there was nothing but water and wooden pylons, stretching out and disappearing into the fog.

After pulling into the station, you walk out the doors and down the steps, and then… water.

I mean, obviously Venice is full of water; canals are the first thing that people think of when you mention the city. I’m not sure why it was such a shock—but it is certainly beautiful. It’s beyond beautiful.

There are no cars. None at all, unless you go to Piazzale Roma, the bus station, connected to the mainland via a long causeway. You might not stop and think, really, about the logistics and the mind-boggling reality of it, until you see a police boat, or a vaporetto (the boat equivalent of a city bus), or a taxi-boat. Or an ambulance boat. Seriously; the ambulances are boats! I don’t know why this made such an impression on me, I just hadn’t thought about it at all until I heard a siren (the ambulances have the same sirens throughout the country) and suddenly realized that it was coming from a boat. Hah!

Canal Grande is the main road, so to speak, dividing the island more or less in half. The vaporetti run mostly through this and around the circumference of the island, with a few making trips to the outlying islands as well. Branching off from Canale Grande are many smaller canals, some with sidewalks and some running right along the edges of buildings and residences.

The water is this amazing, luminous teal, much closer to green than blue. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know what determines the color of an ocean—but it can’t be the canals themselves, because the water is this color all the way out to Burano, at least. Is all of the Mediterranean like this? It’s crazy!

If you keep walking in a given direction, you eventually hit the edge. Venice isn’t all that big, so it’s not difficult.

And I do mean the edge. The weather’s been a little foggy for the past couple of days, so sometimes it feels more like the edge of the world than the edge of the city.

Anyway, not every street is a canal—there are lots of canals, but there are just as many pedestrian walkways, some as broad as big streets. Or maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle; maybe the canals are the streets, and the dry “streets” are just really big, really busy sidewalks with names. Without any cars, it’s hard to say. But then, boats kind of are cars here. Gah! Worldview… so different! Cannot apply existing logic!

Anyway.

I took a walk around to Piazza San Marco on Sunday, in addition to several museums. The city museums are fairly expensive, but you can actually buy a pass that costs 18 euro and is good for something like twelve different exhibitions, all part of the Venice Civic Museum Foundation. This includes the good ones, as far as I can tell—several palaces and famous houses, the glass and lace museums on Murano and Burano respectively, Museo Correr by San Marco, and a natural history museum. The pass admits you into each one once and is good for six months, and considering that standard admission probably averages 8-10 euro for each museum, it’s a seriously good deal. I saw Ca’ Rezzonico (basically a showcase of 18th century Venetian noble lifestyle, plus a painting gallery) and the Museo Correr (a series of themed exhibits on the history, culture, and politics of pre-unification Venice, with lots of cool knicknacks, old maps, model ships, weapons, and an engraved narwhal horn). Afterwards, I hung around Piazza San Marco for a little while, but it was full of tourists and the weather wasn’t good enough to justify the long line for the belltower.

Up next: the islands of Murano and Burano!