Yes, we have Venetian blinds in our Venice hotel room.

They're electric. So are the window shades. The curtains are manual. We're staying in something called a "design hotel." This means that everything is based on form rather than function. The doorknobs are a series of stacked square prisms starting with about and inch square and increasing in size as the get closer to the door, up to around doorknob size. The is very pretty, but (1) they have sharp corners which hurt if you brush by them and (2) the "Do Not Disturb" signs do not in any way fit over them, because they are very designed too with a small rectangular hole smaller than any of the squares. I looked to see if there's some special way to do this but I gave up.

Normally, this kind of thing bothers me, but in Venice, where the entire city is based on form rather than function, it seems appropriate. We spent the day walking around. I navigated this time, because the whole place is too offensive to Ronnie's sense of order for her to both navigate and enjoy the scenery. I thought the problem was going to be too many streets with no names, like in Padua. Nope. Here they have too many names, as many as 3 on some streets. You can't make a map big enough to contain the information. Fortunately, we only got lost once, and that was when we were looking for something that is such a major landmark that we were able to find signs leading there, even when we were in the wrong place.

On the other hand, it really is very pretty here. If we hadn't just come from the most beautiful city ever and had such a hard time getting here we might feel differently about it. The water sneaks in and around places in unexpected, confusing, and sometimes very attractive ways. There are some nice, wide open waterside vistas. We went to an island to watch a Peter Greenaway "vision" of a large painting that was there until Napoleon stole it and put it in the Louvre. The views across the way at the city were just wonderful and the waterbus ride home scenic. On the other hand, the Piazza San Marco was too overrun with people and pigeons to enjoy. We debated whether we would like it without all the people, but we weren't really sure.

First look at Venice