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Published: July 22nd 2011
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Part 2 of our honeymoon.
After a short train journey we arrived in Venezia Santa Lucia Train station in Venice. It’s quite surreal to arrive at a train station surrounded by water, but that not was not the biggest shock of my life, nor was how amazingly expensive everything is in Venice.
The weather was unbearably hot and we had no idea how to get to our hotel so we decided to splash out on a water taxi, these taxis have the official title of 'world’s most expensive taxi', from the train station to our hotel, near St Mark’s Square, our taxi cost 60 Euros. It is no more than a 15-20 minute journey and it doesn’t even take you all the way to your hotel, if the boat can’t fit or you’re not directly on a canal you’ll have to walk the rest of the way on foot.
When we arrived in St Mark’s Square we didn’t really have time to fully absorb the beauty of the Basilica as we had to find our hotel and check in. There was a guy with a sort of wheel barrow to carry your cases to your hotel, as we
had limited time in Venice and I didn’t particularly fancy carrying around several bags in the heat trying to find our hotel I paid him to carry our bags to our hotel. 15 Euros for a 5 minute walk to the hotel. For those of you counting that is 75 Euros spent in 20 minutes so far in Venice and that is just getting to our hotel!
Once checked in to our hotel, The San Gallo, we headed straight out for lunch. On our way to our hotel I saw a vision of heaven, something I had not had in a very long time, Hard Rock Cafe (for those of you that have read my past blogs you will know how much I love the Hard Rock Cafe). After an amazing lunch we headed to The Rialto Bridge, as with every city the first thing I do is get a map so I can navigate a city on foot. Venice is unlike any city I have ever been to before, there are no streets but canals and the parts that you can actually walk along are more like alleyways than streets. As it is peak season in Venice absolutely
everywhere is full of people, so those alleyways are not the most comfortable place to be in the heat.
With my map in hand I felt confident I could find my way around, however, if you were to have a map with the name of every street written on it you would need a huge map, this meant that my pocket sized map did not contain all of the streets so navigating was not as easy as I had anticipated, in fact it was quite possibly the most difficult place to navigate I have ever been to. As the buildings have been built around the islands nothing is parallel, if you see a street you want to get to, that is near where you are standing and you can find a route that might mean going backwards in relation to your final destination stick to the route. Do not try to go to the next turning as there may not be a bridge/alleyway that connects to the place you are trying to get to, I learnt this the hard way.
After a few touristy pictures of The Rialto Bridge we decided to have a gondola ride, at 100
Euros for about 30 minutes it’s is most definitely not cheap but as it is our honeymoon we couldn’t exactly skip the most romantic thing ever. As we left the Grand Canal on our gondola ride and made our way along a quiet narrow canal Nikki pulled out a card for me to open. I opened it and on the front was a famous picture of the Grand Canal and inside was a beautiful message thanking me for our honeymoon. Our gondola ride was amazing but was over so quickly, during our ride we passed the house of Marco Polo and the House of the famous lover, Casanova.
Our first night in Venice we wanted to have a romantic meal by the Grand Canal and as you can imagine this comes with a price tag. In Venice you have to pay to sit in all of the restaurants, the amount varies from place to place but is usually 1-2 Euros per person. We had dinner at The Grand Monaco Hotel, at the start of The Grand Canal, the cover charge here was 6.50 per person, 13 Euros before you have even had any food or drink, but that is
the price you pay for a view, but 13 Euros to sit down was not the biggest shock of my life.
When we got to the restaurant we asked about a table as we hadn’t reserved “one hour wait, you can sit inside and wait if you want?”, the waiter looked at us as if to say “what are these peasants doing here”. As we had been wandering around all day and had only seen one other restaurant with tables overlooking the water we decided to wait, before we even had time to go to the bar a table miraculously became available. I think they told us there were no tables as they didn’t want us in their restaurant as this was a classy place and I am very far from classy lol.
We sat down and had a look at the champagne, just to satisfy our curiosity as to how expensive the champagne would actually be and shockingly it was actually fairly priced (this however was not the biggest shock of my life) a bottle of Veuve Clique was 30 Euros and a bottle of Cristal 244 Euros, the cheapest I had ever seen a bottle of
Cristal in any restaurant. As we were in the most romantic city in the world and as it is our honeymoon I decided to splash out again, we went for the Cristal.
This was the first night so far this trip we had gone out and forgotten to put on any mosquito repellent and my god it was a big mistake seeing as mosquitos love me. During dinner I got 7 bites, 6 of which were within an inch of each other and when a mosquito bites me they swell up and go rock hard, after they began to swell they actually looked like little islands on a map, maybe the mosquitos were trying to imitate the 118 islands that make up Venice by biting my back in various places.
After our meal Nikki was drunk so we decided to walk off all of the lovely food we had just eaten and to sober Nikki up slightly. Another trip to The Rialto Bridge, this time for some night pictures, then an early night as we had a busy day ahead of us the following day.
Sorry to leave you in suspense about the biggest shock of my
life but I had so much to say about our trip to Venice that I didn't want to write a novel of a blog that would be too long to read in one go so I decided to split it into 2 blogs.
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anonymous
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Good times :)
Brings back some good memories of Venice and yes the crazy prices of course! A beautiful city though and great pics one again.