Very small Venice

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The ferry for Corfu to Venice runs for 25hrs so I had some serious time to kill, most of this was spent chatting to Brazilian Matt and catching up on much needed sleep. I also had a surprisingly good meal on board too that didnt cost the earth and when we went to watch the evening movie met a pair of Canadian girls. The movie turned out to be some Italian-costumed-erotic-musical-dreamscape type deal which didnt appeal much so we ended up playing cards instead.

I woke up early on the ferry the next morning and was lucky enough to watch the sunrise over Venice which was quite beautiful. It turned out the Canadian girls Miranda (Mingus) and Sasha were staying at the same camping ground as me so we got the shuttle bus together. Now Venice is actually a small island, and as space is at a premium there are no hostels in Venice itself so we were staying on the mainland at a camping ground with rooms, a restaurant and a pool! It was a beautiful day so we settled in with a dip in the pool before heading back into the city for the afternoon.

General wandering was the order of the day and it didn't take too long to realise that the city itself is small, and i mean very small, we wandered around most of it within 3 hours. It is totally tourist driven, if you like glassware, clothes, shoes, pizza and gelato then you'll love it because thats all you can buy anywhere. So buy we did, and I will say the pizza and gelato were as good as I had dreamed from Italy! We wandered back just on witching hour and it was quite amazing to see the city go completely dead as it got dark, we took a bus back to camp and had a quiet night in the cabin.

Big breakfast is served at the restaurant and after the girls squirrelled away the unused condiments I jumped on the internet for a couple of hours to catch up on some emails and organise some free accomodation in Rome :D We cruised back into the city again just after lunch and wandered again. Once you walk off the beaten path the alleys are like a ghost town, they are mostly dead ends or only lead to peoples front doors. The canals are quite beautiful and very well connected, they have boat police and ambulances and boy boat racers too! By late afternoon we had another hankering for more pizza and gelato and i bought a 5 scoop waffle bowl! By the end of this afternoon we had seen all we could see, and most of it twice, without going into the art galleries and the city of Venice was done.

That night back at the camp a Contiki tour group was going through and having a toga party, not one to miss out we grabbed the sheets off our beds and joined in for a drink and dance though still got to bed at a reasonable hour. The next morning I was up and after a refreshing cold shower (the amount of cold showers I have had to have on this trip...) breakfasted with the girls and headed off, I was catching the next available train to Roma.

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