Ahh Venice

The debacle of the american airlines flight to zurich (delayed by 2 hours) spilled over to our connecting swiss air flight. We caught the next available swiss air flight to venice on standby. The swiss air plane had some troubles of its own (no ac and stuck on the tarmac waiting for clearance). Anyway, swiss air turned me around when they gave out free swiss chocolates for the inflight snack. We met a nice couple from dallas on that flight. They were trying to get to a cruise on time and were pretty worried. We parted ways at the venice baggage claim around 3:45 and they were catching the fastest (and probably most expensive) water taxi to their ship. This provided us a valuable lesson -- it may be better to fly in a day ahead of your cruise just to make sure.
We took the waterbus to our hotel -- a very slow moving method of transport. The lagoon is marked with channels and speed limits (sometimes as low as 5km/hr). We made it to venice island (peninsula?) about an hour after taking off from the airport. One big bonus of the waterbus, however, was that we got to see the murano and lido islands up close (but not on shore) which was not part of the itinerary.
After disembarking, we managed to get utterly and completely lost (er, I mean we managed to invent a new walking tour from the dock to our hotel. Yeah that's it). Eventually, after many right turns and probably just as many left turns we ended up at the very nice Hotel Al Piave. The hotel staff is very friendly and the room is decent size. Thank you Rick Steves and TripAdvisor!
We had dinner at Osteria di Santa Marina, a recommendation from Jorgina. The plan was to grab reservations for tomorrow and eat somewhere simple (since the airplane breakfast was doing a number on me -- my guess is the kosher pancakes had milk in them. Yep, kosher. A buddy of mine recommended changing up the standard substandard in flight food to one of the alternatives. I went with kosher and aside from the pancakes it turned out to be better than the regular meal option). Anyway, it turns out the restaurant is closed on sunday. So, we asked for a table tonight. Luckily, they had one. We are seated in the first room indoors, a nice table. We get the menu and open it to find prix fixe, standard 6 course Italian meal. Well, my stomach and my wallet and maybe some of my genetic code wasn't having any of that. Jadine agreed, too. We decided on a 3 course set, which worked out well. We had an OK barley pasta dish, some decent onions and chicken saute, some delicious scallops (albeit 3 small ones), a fantastic tuna steak (tasted like a juicy prime rib, it was excellent), and a john dorey fish filet with some very tasty porcinis. Dessert was rosemary ice cream and macedonia frutta (italian word of the day macedonia meaning salad/cocktail). After dinner we strolled through venice to see the Rialto bridge at night and heard some Phantom of the Opera music being played by a quartet in St Mark's square.
Tomorrow's a full day of venice. Can't wait to see what else we can find in this maze of a city. Ahh Venice.