First impressions of Venice

I had never visited Venice on previous trips to Italy - somehow I had been put off by stories of unbearable crowds and smelly canals, but I'm here now and couldn't be happier about it. By avoiding Venice I had somehow also kept myself in ignorance about the makeup of the city - is it on an island? Are the houses built on land, or standing on pilings over the water? So here are my first impressions after having been here overnight. Venice is indeed an island, actually several of them, that were formed by deposits in the delta of a river emptying into the sea. The canals were built to drain the water so that buildings could be built on the land. The major island is shaped like a fish and the train (or cruise ship) brings you to the mouth of the fish. Our apartment is near the tail. To save a few euros and have an adventure I walked from the train station to the apartment the first time. This would almost have been a good idea if I had had a decent map to help me through the labyrinth of alleys (called "called" here), over the bridges crossing canals (all but the largest are called "rios"), through tiny squares (campi) to our apartment in the quiet Castello district. There I was greeted by the manager, Signora Argia, who speaks not a word of English which doesn't deter her from non-stop, lengthy, over-the-top warm, welcoming conversations with each guest in Italian, regardless of the nationality or language abilities of the guest-of-the-moment. In fact, she is such a treat that I need to write a separate blog post just about her. Yes, Venice is crammed with tourists - each of whom is wandering around town with an expression mixed with puzzlement and awe, glancing back and forth between the map in their hands and at the city around them - but it is a place like nowhere else on this earth. Parts of it - like some of the palaces along the Grand Canal - look abandoned and eerily beautiful and then their are neighborhoods of an actually working city. A motorboat driver honks his horn as he rounds a blind corner of a tiny canal, a young mother stops to pick up her baby and stroller to carry it up the steps of a bridge, tiny plastic bags full of garbage sit outside apartment doors waiting to be collected in the morning, laundry hangs on clotheslines suspended over canals, a shrine to Jesus hangs on the wall of the Communist party headquarters. There's a grandeur here with architecture influenced by the East and remnants of prosperity of days gone by, but there's also a delight in the details of daily life that are so very different from the way it is back home.