More Venice

So we finished our pizza, were laughed at by some Italian kids and took a few pictures by some historical looking Roman columns, and headed back to the bus station where we zeroed in on a group of grungy looking American kids with backpacks, who were unsurprisingly headed to the same campground as us grungy looking American kids. A bus picked us up, and the driver informed us that he´d take us to the campground for free, but if we wanted to get back we´d have to pay, which made me glad we already had reservations. The ride was about half an hour long and at one point stretched over a bay where the only land in sight was the long, thin stretch of road we were traveling on. It reminded me of the train scene in Spirited Away.
The campground itself was in a small town outside of Venice and looked like your basic tourist campground. Wooden rails, gravel roads, unheated pool, all that. We got lucky and ended up in a five person "bungalow," esentially a mobile home with a kitchen/dining room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, for less than 20€ each. There were mosquitos everywhere outside and the showers only ran two temperatures: scalding and freezing, but we were pretty happy and impressed with our humble abode.
We paid the three euros or so to return to Venice on the next bus and scoped out the city.
Our goal was to find the big, famous main plaza, which I have now forgotten the name of. We followed the signs on the corners of buildings pointing toward the plaza, which ended up being a pretty good way to get a tour of the whole city as the route we followed was anything but direct.
We stopped to get gelato from an old Italian man who had reggae blasting from his shop and Bob Marely posters on the wall. I went out on a limb and got kiwi, a privelage I would not have had in the United States. It tasted fresh and tart, although having the seeds in there was pretty cool. Not sure I´d do it again.
Also stopped at plently of tourist shops (including the Venice Disney Store!) and a few beautiful views -- watching the lights of houses and boats reflect on the dark canals after the sun went down, that sort of thing.
When we finally arrived at the huge plaza, there was some sort of luminous blob floating about 20 feet in the air, and a small crowd of people gathered around it. As we got closer I realized it was lighting for a film set -- they´d blocked of quite a lot of the plaza and old palace and in the distance we could see dozens of actors in 16th Century aristocrasy garb preparing for a ball scene of some sort. Somehow the grips had rigged up a nine-foot-long inflatable balloon with lights inside of it to create a nice diffused source, perhaps to get a daylight effect. Elsewhere a huge spotlight had been rigged up to a high clocktower and shown down on the famous palace (I think it was a palace) that was part of the scene. From a couple of extras in the crowd we learned that the film was a Disney production called Casanova, which imdb tells me will just be on TV, not in theatres.
At the other end of the (really quite large) plaza we found a 50-year-old German man sitting on some cathedral steps doing a water color sketch of the palace for his own notebook. Although none of us spoke any of the same languages, we were able to communicate a little. He seemed like a very nice guy. Nearby, locals hired for the film production dashed around doing who knows what else and at opposing resturants across the plaza, two famous dueling orchestras kept the music going strong . . .