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Venice
Hi all, we’ve just come back from a thoroughly enjoyable and self-indulgent weekend in Venice. It was our last planned short-break in Europe. God, we are so going to miss being able to nip away from London into mainland Europe on the weekends. It is such a fantastic thing to be able to head away from work on a Friday afternoon and arrive in plenty of time for dinner in your pick of European cities. Soggy tuna and sweetcorn roll with a can of coke at your desk for lunch - fresh pasta with pesto and bottle of wine seated in a lovely little town square for dinner….sighhhh…...
It’s hard to know what to write about Venice given that so much has been written about it in the past and so many of you have visited it before us. I know Venice has all this amazing history and stuff (and being from a lil’ battler nation myself I love the idea of a city-state going head to head with the powerhouse nations of the day and carving out an empire through astute trading and politicking) but being there put me in mind of a theme park. Maybe the sort
of place that Walt Disney and Richard Branson would have developed if they'd put their heads together.
There are gazillions of tourists in Venice at any one time, and as crowded as it is everyone seems to wander around quite happily, studiously oblivious to each other. The fact that 90%!o(MISSING)f the traffic on the waterways are Japanese filled gondolas and that every bridge has a stack of Americans on it either muscling for a photo-op or performing origami on their maps in futile attempts to find out where they are doesn’t seem to detract from the charm of the place one bit. The city somehow just absorbs the hoards and continues to engage and please the senses while quietly emptying the wallet.
Most of the time we spent wiggling around the streets and alleys in half-hearted attempts to find
this building or
that square. Enjoying getting lost and then trying to find our way again. The main event was really just soaking up the sights, trying to get the perfect gondola photo and debating whether our waists could justify another gelato (yes, yes they could). We went up and down the main canal on the vaporettos a
Canal-side Fuel Stop
We prefered the cheaper Aperol to its more well branded cousin Campri...not that we were fussy...couple of times and its was great to bask in the sun at the front or back and watch the city scroll by.
We’d heard that food in Venice can be a bit of an issue, with lots of places fleecing the masses with servings of Dolmio pasta sauce and limp lettuce for top dollar. Happily, we found this not to be the case and had some decent meals, including a marathon dinner effort at an old place (the name escapes me) that used to be a brothel but now specialises in fish. Liver was twinging at the end of the weekend though, as we’d been having a litre of good prosecco at each meal (you know how it is, those little 500ml carafes are barely a glass each) and the odd Campari spritzer in between.
The only real bit of pace during the weekend was our journey to the airport on Sunday envening. A missed airport vaporetto sent us on a daring cross-Venice sprint where Katherine proved her navigational skills are second to none by getting us across the city in 20 minutes, using only back streets to avoid the more crowded thoroughfares. A number of poor
...freedom...
Fly winged rats, fly! tourists got their ankles mashed by my barely in control wheelie-bag in the process - sorry, I hate it when that happens to me. Despite the brillance of K’s navigational skills, our timetable reading skills were sadly lacking as the vaporetto we were trying to intercept didn’t stop at the dock we thought it would. No hassles though, we just sat quietly on the edge of the wharf in the fading light and waited for the next one.
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AnNa
Hi!well I am just stopping by to let u know that the gondola's "prows" are (and will be 4ever) 6 as they are representing the 6 sestieri (from sei=6, that means "areas") of Venice : S.Marco, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, Castello, S.Polo and S.Croce! Cheers!