| Glenn's Venice Journal #3 4-05-02 It's Friday morning and I have decided to utilize the remaining hours on our water taxi pass (Remember we bought them yesterday at 11:00 a.m. and they are good for 24 hours (Not that anyone checks!)). I took off by myself to enjoy the ride around the Grand Canal to see what views I could capture with the camera on our last few days in Venice while Erin stayed behind to work on her journal. I stopped by my favorite bakery for my morning bread and off I went. The Grand Canal ride was good. I captured a few pictures before returning back to the hotel around noon. Erin was just finishing up her journal entries and we took off with the plan to go shopping and see a different part of Venice. Well, let's talk about shopping first. I showed Erin some oil paintings of Venice that I thought would be enjoyable to have displayed at the house. We found one we both really liked but decided to keep looking. We had been looking at Venetian Carnevale masks all week and had found one at a local store that we truly liked. We decided that we would purchase the mask, and wait on the oil painting. We met with the same young lady that we had talked to the other day. She was very helpful and provided a couple of options, with of course more expensive pricing. We selected the mask of our choosing, she wrapped it up, offered to ship it for us, and we opted to find a less expensive means to ship it back to the states. Boy, did we learn a lot in the next few hours!!! One of the things we learned was that we could get the taxes we paid on the mask back that day. Wow!!! Great!!! How much was that, we thought. Well, it was 20% of the price. Even bigger wow!!! Oh yeah, the tax refund office wants almost half of that to process the tax refund. We thought o.k., some is better than none. O.K. so here are the rules. You must request your tax refund within 10 days of purchase. Great!!! We will do it the same day. You must mail the form back to the tax refund office within 30 days with a Customs stamp on it, AND you must show the item to customs prior to obtaining the stamp. Well, we did not plan on leaving the country within 30 days and we did not plan on carrying the item around with us just to show to customs upon leaving. We were not sure what to do about our tax refund but we definitely wanted to get it shipped home. So, off to Fed Ex. Fed Ex quoted us over 50 Euro's to ship this 1 kg package home. Wow, that sounded expensive, but maybe I had forgotten exactly how far away from home we are. The other issue was that they did not have a box big enough for the mask or we could get the 10 kg box that would cost over 90 Euros' to ship home. We thought the 10 kg box may work if we could add everything else we had to ship (extra items we decided after we had gotten to Italy we didn't need) in the same box. We went back to the store, where she had quoted us a less expensive option on shipping the mask, not by much, with UPS. Well, the other thing she could do was obtain our tax refund by using the appropriate paperwork with UPS. This was the deal!! We shipped the mask by using the store and expect to receive our tax refund in the next 40 days. (By the way, you could only get your tax refund in U.S. $, British Pounds, or Yen. Then, to be useful, you would have to pay to convert them to Euro's, which was the next window over. What a way to make money!!!) We finally wandered off to the north end of San Marco, San Polo, and San Croce. We wandered through the street looking at the sites and stores abound. We called it an early night with the intention to have dinner, relax at the hotel, and then go to the internet cafe to work on the web-site from 9 - 11 p.m.. To say the least dinner was nice but the internet cafe never opened back up (even thought it was advertised). Maybe the young man got busy, after all, it was Friday night in Venice. |
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| Above, a water shot of the Accademia bridge, a huge wooden structure crossing the Grand Canal. Below, a view of one of the magnificent painted arches of the Basilica di San Marco. |