Most of the famous sights in Venice are so crowded with tourists that we did our best to avoid them. The one cultural visit we really wanted to make however was the Sargent and Venice exhibition at the Museo Correr. We headed over to the far end of Piazza San Marco and were blocked by standing water about 6 inches deep, apparently from high tides. Backtracking a bit, we tried to enter the square from the next street, where the situation was no better. Repeating the manueuver a couple of more times had us circumnavigating the "most elegant drawing room in Europe" as Napoleon called it ( evidently he hadn't seen it with thousands of tourists standing around with pigeons on their heads and arms), until we finally reached the entrance to to museum, where we found locked gates. The guards were on strike.
At that moment Susanne and Ari came up to us, shoes and socks in their hands, feet wet. Coming from another direction, they hadn't been able to avoid the water and had waded through. They weren't happy to hear of the strike either, but they had a little adventure to show for the morning.
Later in the day we dropped in to visit Fabio and Marina, friends of P. who own an art shop near the Frari church, which we suddenly realized we had never entered on previous visits to Venice. Mistake...we had been missing something spectacular.
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