It's a long way to d'Alba doro.

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Venice. Wow!

It is exactly how you always imagined. When we jumped off the bus from Munich, I literally couldn't believe my eyes. The movies often lie, but Venezia is no lie, although it is a place that needs to be seen to be believed. Gondola's fill the landscape, serenaded by larger than life opera guys, in the background pizza bases are twisted and launched, whilst the gelato sellers whip up a frenzy of colours, as Niki and me lie comatose in a prosecco induced daze, compltely unaware of any of it. Not quite, but it is a magical experience. We met this guy in Munich that said Venice was a horrible, despicable, lonely and boring place. How wrong he was, but I think perhaps it had somehting to do with Venice being were he and his girlfriend parted ways. A shame, because it has to be the most romantic city we have been to yet, it definitely gives Paris a run for it's money, which is something you need a lot of in Italy. Money.

This is where we made our mistake. because of Venice being just a tad expensive, we couldn't afford to stay in the actual city, and so ended booking a mobile home in a campsite in Mestre, the industrial and residential area (where all the locals live cos they're fed up of the floods). We checked it out on the website, and they said that they run a shuttle bus to Venice every hour, until November. Well, we thought we'd better check, and so phoned up to confirm that the bus was running, to which the reply was a very confident and sure "yes". However, and I'm sure you've already figured out how this bit ends, when we got to Venice, we went and waited for our shuttle bus, which surely enough, never arrived. So we called again, only to be told that the shuttle bus was in fact NOT running.
"But you told us it was" we said
"whoever told you that was wrong" came the reply from the woman at the other end.
"but we spoke to you" we replied. which she adamantly denied.

So, deterred by this inital deceipt, we attempted to find another place to stay, in vain, as the cheapest place was at least 100 euros a night, a bit over our budget i must say. So we ended up jumping on a local bus to the airport, then changing to another bus which got us to the campsite in about 45 minutes, so not tooo bad, but a bit of a bitch. And the local buses only run until about 8pm, so if you want to go out in Venezia at night, you've got a long walk home. The campsite was okay, we got our own twin demountable with a bathroom and stuff, and there was a supermarket (if it was open) which was handy, and the restaurant served pretty good food, if not expensive beers. It was worth staying there to save the money, but considering we only had a couple of days in Venice, it did take up a lot of valuable time travelling back and forth, along the 4km bridge that connects the 117 islands that make up Venice to the mainland.

We only really spent one full day in Venice, which is really all you need, just to see the canals, and a few glass shops, and wander down some crazy winding back streets that seem to lead to nowhere in particular. We went to the main plaza San Marco, and managed to force our way through the literally thousands of flying rats (pigeons), we took a boat cruise on a vaporetti, which is basically a ferry or water taxi, which was really amazing, cruising along in a boat right next to peoples houses is quite surreal. We drank lots of Prosecco (Italian champagne) if we could get the corks out. We didn't realise that you needed a corkscrew to open these bottles, so we tried to pull it out by hand for about ten minutes, then after me and a local spent another ten minutes trying to pull the cork out with my swiss army knife, which i bent beyond repair, we found a shopkeeper who had a proper waiter's friend, which did the trick, by which time the bottle that we had searched for for so long to find a cold one, was warm. But hey who cares? We ate lots of pizza (which was really fucking good, a pizza that is made in under ten minutes is a good sign that they know what they're doing), and wandered down lots of canals, admiring the simple beauty of a city built on water. Then it was back to the campsite for the night, so we just caught the sunsetting over Venice, before going to hang out at with the crew at the campsite, who were a little too busy watching the football to actually serve us, we met a lovely girl called Lisa from Hong Kong who was travelling alone, and had made the same mistake as us with choosing somewhere to stay. She was friendly but we weren't quite on the same wave-length, i hope we managed to keep her in fairly nice company. Apart from that we didn't really do much in Venice, i bought myself an Italian flat hat, and the next day it was onto our 22 hour bus to Barcelona, where our trip was supposed to finish, but as you already know, we scored some extra time in Spain. Next blog.

cyabye.

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Photos

Saint Toma
You truly are a saint in our eyes Mr McQueen

Comments

[Ouaga]

Jealous
Very jealous that you have got to see Venice, little bro. And I have heard about how expensive it is. Well done for getting there and even buying another ridiculous hat in the process.

[Griffo]

Venice Debauch
Sion every pic of you with a glass shows you looking even more debauched than the previous one. Take care or you will look like me! Dadx