Venice, Italy

Venice is a unique European city, and it would be considered so anywhere in the world. There isn't any room on the narrow streets for cars, so you have to leave them in a parking lot a little ways off. There are boats everywhere, and throughout the entire time that we were there, every time I saw two boats on the same canal I was afraid that they were going to crash. But they never did. Somehow, whoever was steering the boats always managed to avoid contact at the very last moment. We ended up not visiting many things, but what we did see was amazing. We toured the San Marco church. The walls were covered in beautiful gold mosaics that depicted various scenes from the Bible and phrases in Latin. At one time, the mosaics had all been silver because it was the most precious metal. But when gold became more valuable, they had everything redone. By far our favorite thing in Venice was the clock tower in the Piazza San Marco. It was a twenty-four hour clock, which was something Darcy had always fantasized about. At every hour, two mechanical men at the very top rang a bell. We only got to see it once, but at certain times of day more mechanical men come out from the middle. The clock had a sun on the hour hand and a moon on the minute hand. Around the edges there were all the signs of the Zodiac. Since we went during June, Gemini was at the top, which was cool because Darcy and I are Gemini.
It rained every day that we were there. As soon as the rain started, all of the street venders would suddenly conjure umbrellas from nowhere. The Piazza San Marco flooded, and there was  only a small strip of land that wasn't covered in water. Everybody who didn't want to get their shoes wet got stuck in a human traffic jam on this tiny strip. However, those who didn't care about getting wet (me included) took off their shoes and ran through the water. We got around much faster and had much more fun than those in the human traffic jam.
On the last day we visited the fish market. We saw all manner of strange and exotic fish (we even saw a swordfish head), when we realized that we were actually looking at fish that we had eaten in their raw form we got pretty grossed out. The day we left it was bright and sunny (of course). We took a water taxi to the mainland waved goodbye to the floating city of Venice.