Venice - the start of our journey

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April 8th 2006

Published: June 1st 2006

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Angie Niki

Venice

We walked out of the train station, and this is the first thing we saw!

This being the start of our journey threw us in the deep end, because when we arrived we had to catch transport to Mogliano which is in the 'suburbs'. When directed to the bus we jumped on, but we weren't sure what stop to get off at, if we were going the right direction, or if we were even on the right bus. Luckily some of the locals pitched in, and between broken english (and our italian phrase book) we managed to get to the right station. We found the Italians to be very kind and helpful to us during our time in Italy.

For our first night we booked a nice hotel to help us get over the jetlag. The hotel was in Mogliano and almost opposite was a small local market selling fish, meats of every italian kind we could tell, pasta, veggies, clothes (Angie bought a jacket because she didn't have one and it was a little cooler than we thought!) and we also found a Valantino Rossi hat. It was fantastic seeing all the locals going about their daily life and yelling at each other in Italian over a sausage or some other food. Very authentic.

Angie in Venice

After the market we had lunch and enjoyed some of Italy's famous pizza and pasta..... YUM! and set on our way to Venice on the train.

On arriving in Venice, our first view was amazing. Despite tourists (like ourselves) being everywhere, it was an island like no other. Man made and in the middle of the sea, with canals and boats as the main mode of transport (there are no cars in Venice), it was a fully functioning city!

On our second day in Venice, we invested in an all day ferry ticket, we found it to be a fantastic way to get around through canals and also to the other islands. We went out to Murano (island) home of all the Venice glass, managed to find a place where we could watch the guys spinning glass into all sorts of things which was amazing, then did a spot of shopping for glass jewellery. We continued on around the outskirts of Venice by ferry and then landed at the grand San Marco Piazza & Palazza Ducale which we entered and looked around, so old and beautiful, very detailed decorations and architecture. We then wandered back through the

Masquerades

small alleyways to the Grand Canal and caught the boat back to the main station to get the train out of Venice to Treviso where we were staying the night at 'Villa Angelina' which was quaint (you can tell why we chose it... Angie liked the name of it!). It was a traditional house that a guy (Andreaus) rents out rooms that are much cheaper than staying in Venice. He had even picked us up from the train station and gave us a quick tour of Treviso. Treviso is another lovely village/town but it was really nice to have a locals perspective as he drove us around.

Train ride to Treviso was only about 20 minutes and Andreaus had recommended a couple of places to eat near his house so we tried out the one which was 'cheap and good food'. We walked in and there was not a word of english on the menu nor did they speak english, so our waitress pulled out a translation book and we were guessing what a few things were. We ended up we just pointing to anything on the menu and hoped for the best, luckily it was pretty good food