A Friday Funny - Venice

It's always an adventure filled with humorous moments when we travel with my husband's identical twin and his wife. Polly and I have bonded over the years as we have had to endure the twin jokes and escapades. One of the oft repeated is when a waitress will come to the table and suddenly realize the resemblance between the two. She'll usually say something like, "Are you two brothers?" So begins the litany.

"No. What makes you think so?" Followed by "We were womb mates." It takes a while to catch on to that last one but most waitresses will shrug it off and take the order.

In Venice our fun didn't have so much to do with their twiness as much as it did our ignorance of how things were done there. We were introduced to St. Mark's Square in the rain. Old buildings do not look appealing when they are dripping wet. My first thought was why do people think this is so beautiful? And then the sun came out and dried up all the rain. Ah, yes. Amazing difference.

We walked around the square and visited some of the buildings including the cathedral and then decided it would be nice to enjoy a real Italian cappuccino. There were delightful looking sidewalk cafes set up and each one had a small group of musicians playing at them. We picked out one--I think they had some stringed instruments--and sat at a table. A waiter handed us menus and we said we just wanted cappuccinos. He shrugged, collected the menus, and went off to get them.

The cappuccinos were delicious. The music was grand. And then the bill arrived. Both guys did a double take. "Hope you enjoyed those cappuccinos girls," one said. "They were $15 dollars each!"

Apparently, if we had taken the time to look the menu over, we would have discovered that there was a cover charge for sitting at the table to listen to the music. If we would have ordered something with the drinks, the cover charge would have disappeared. Lesson learned.