Word count: 161 Step count: 16,140

Stayed up until midnight again — we’ve got to stop meeting like this — before a 7:30 alarm for 8:00 breakfast. Breakfast was the same as yesterday, but without the corn flakes (did they read my blog?).

Walked to Fundamento Nove where we caught a vaporetto (boat bus) to San Michele cemetery, a completely square island where all Venice’s dead are buried… at least for a while, until they are dug up and the bones interred in a common ossuary. Saw some interesting monuments in the Orthodox section.

From there we took another vaporetto to Murano, the island of glassmakers. First we visited the church there, which claimed a Bellini triptych which we never found (the light was terrible in any case). By then we were hungry and stupid, so we snagged a couple of panini, then went to the Museum of Glass, with a special exhibit of the work of the Ercole Moretti studio and many other beautiful pieces dating back to antiquity. What is it about glass that makes so many glass sculptures resemble sea creatures?

After the museum I spotted a little park and we rested there for a bit under a wisteria arbor. A kids’ birthday party was going on, with Blindman’s Bluff and other screaming jollity, under a banner reading AUGURI (“greetings”).

We wandered around, stopping into various glass shops, and bought some beads for our friend Janna and an Ercole Moretti plate for ourselves. At the Mazzega glass factory, we ran into our tour guide from yesterday, leading another tour. She told us “you must come upstairs to see Paradise” and unhooked a chain to let us upstairs to the private showroom, an area as big as the rest of the establishment put together and filled with marvelous glass… huge pieces, some probably worth tens of thousands of dollars, including three-dimensional representations of some Picasso pieces. Wow, what a delightful bit of kismet!

Very tired and sore then, we went back to our hotel (Google’s walking directions across a body of water included the usual “kayak across the Pacific Ocean” instruction, except that in this case the referenced ferry actually existed) with a stop at a fabulous-looking bakery for a lovely light piece of cheesecake (a nice bit of protein, given that a panini was the only thing we’d eaten since a fairly light breakfast) and a grocery store for cheese and yogurt to add to tomorrow’s breakfast.

Fell over for an hour, then headed out for dinner. The pizza place we’d had in mind got bad reviews on TripAdvisor; the next place we tried sounded great but was “closed for maintenance.” Then we tried one of the places that had looked wonderful on Thursday but was booked solid, thinking we might have a shot because it was earlier in the evening. They did manage to squeeze us in, barely, and we had a fabulous dinner: carrot, green apple, and leek soup; broccoli flan with Parmesan fondue and poppy seeds; five-color ravioli with prawn cream; and a very nummy vegetable lasagne.

Finally, back to the hotel to sort photos, do laundry, write, and blog. A great day.